Yaroslav Leuchenko used to be a pheasant hunter. Now he hunts drones. It is the same thing that the patrols under his command do that are deployed on the corners of Kramatorsk or protecting the municipal workers who repair the damage from the Russian bombings.
The number two of the local police special forces has just gone to a fire caused hours ago by yet another assault by his adversaries.
A nine-story building located in the northern neighborhood of Damansky. Flames erupt violently from several apartments while the two fire vehicles try to combat their progression. Thick smoke rises to the sky.
The large housing blocks of Damansky have become one of the favorite targets of Russian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It is not uncommon to find these structures blackened by past fires. Or with ruins of crushed habitations like those next to the current fire.
The very work of those in charge of extinguishing the flames has acquired an almost dystopian dynamic. They are seen equipped with bulletproof vests and helmets. One of them remains with a drone detector scanning the sky. Leuchenko's police officers keep watch around.
It is not an imaginary danger. At 11:20 the group unexpectedly ceases its work amid shouts of "FPV, FPV!" (a drone model). Everyone present disperses in a hurry. In different directions. You trust in destiny. The Russian pilot can only choose one victim.
In this case, Leuchenko's uniformed men point their weapons and fire bursts at the approaching device. The flight ends with a spectacular explosion in the sky.
The routine is repeated several times.
"Cabs, Cabs, to the shelter, to the shelter!"
Sometimes you have to run for cover because of the UAVs and sometimes because of the arrival of those shocking bombs weighing more than 250 kilos, whose roar - even if they explode a few kilometers away - thunders throughout the area.
"The Russians have attacked firefighters more than a dozen times in recent months. That's why we have to protect them," explains Yaroslav.
It is not uncommon for conversations to remain half-finished. "More drones are coming!" another of the uniformed men shouts as his companions kneel on the ground. More shots.
One of the AUVs was left hanging from the roof of the building. His explosive ended up embedded in the community kindergarten. Yaroslav picks up the remains of another flying contraption that has just fallen on the street. "They are everywhere," he says.
This is the second incident similar to the one Yaroslav has attended in just over an hour. The previous one, another tower block hit by a UAV, forced the evacuation of the last seven residents of the place. They all attend the scene sitting on the park bench.
The event occurred the previous day, at night, but firefighters no longer respond to these emergencies when daylight disappears. Residents have slept on the streets, they say.
"The fire started at 5:00 in the afternoon. The firefighters started working but as they were alerted of a new attack they left and did not return until the morning. We do not know what to do or where to go," says Irina Ivanchenko, 56 years old.
Inside, public employees fight against the bonfire that continues to devour several floors. "We can't go any higher, the heat is unbearable!" shouts one of the firefighters.
"The Russians are using terrorist tactics. They attack civilian residential buildings to create panic," says Leuchenko.
The drone hunts of the Kramatorsk police officers are part of the surreal environment that has been installed in what serves as the "capital" of the Ukrainian-controlled Donbas, which Moscow has been harassing since the summer with a massive assault of drones, rockets and Cab bombs.
What Moscow intends to be the final battle of Donbas officially began on August 21, when kyiv declared the two main urban centers of the so-called "Donbas Fortress" as "zones of active hostility."
According to a Kremlin source cited by the Reuters agency, Russian President Vladimir Putin will not accept any type of agreement or ceasefire until his army captures all of Donetsk. Right now they occupy 80% of the province.
According to Ukrainian General Andriy Biletsky, one of the best-known soldiers in the local army, Putin has demanded that his troops take the entire province by early 2027.
"It is an unrealistic deadline," said the head of the Third Ukrainian Army Corps.
The city, a battlefield
The omnipresent presence of drones has turned movements around this city into a kind of roulette, in which vehicles and pedestrians must take cover every time they hear the dreaded hum of these devices.
Andriyi Quola, a 46-year-old Marine soldier, doesn't even put down his anti-drone rifle while enjoying a coffee in one of the increasingly few businesses that are still open in the town.
"We just shot down a Shahid (another Russian UAV) on the hill. Be careful, the FPVs are very active today," he said before returning to the road.
On September 5, Russian aviation attempted to destroy the main bridge that connects the two halves of the town to accentuate its progressive isolation. The structure was damaged but remains open to road traffic.
The presence of burned cars in the center of the town is a reminder of the Kherson model that was implemented in this place several months ago. Everything that moves is a target of the Russian devices.
Another team of police monitors a work carried out by employees of the public water company in a grove of trees. The drilling machine remains covered by anti-drone mesh.
Feder, a 46-year-old agent, clarifies that in the three hours they have been there they have had to open fire on another trio of UAVs. Actually, four, because his words are interrupted when one of his companions fires his machine gun at the approaching flying contraption.
"The Russians are going crazy this morning," says the member of the security forces.
Yaroslav Leuchenko estimates that his forces usually shoot down about 30 UAVs each day, but he adds: "The army shooters who are stationed before Kramatorsk destroy about 500 before they get here."
Kramatorsk and Sloviansk hold a special symbolism for Ukraine. They were captured by pro-Russian forces in the spring of 2014 - when Moscow began the conflict - and then released in July of that same year.
War and robots
War has returned to these metropolises, but it is not the same war. It is something absolutely different. The landscape of these urban centers is more typical of the Mad Max era: networks covering the avenues, vehicles protected by bars and spikes, UAVs flying through the sky and robots, dozens of them, traveling the routes that march towards the confrontation zone.
Now, most of the supplies received by the military stationed in the so-called "Death Zone" - a space of variable width - are sent with these unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). Supplying with trucks or all-terrain vehicles is history. "It would be suicidal," says Oleg - nicknamed Dream -, the head of a unit of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade.
His group is preparing to send three of these UGVs to the front. They are loaded with drone batteries, ammunition, food and water.
The new way of waging war includes such atypical knowledge as how cargo should be placed on robots. Dream, a young 26-year-old former lead singer of a rock group, explains to his subordinates that the water bottles have to go in front. "FPVs usually attack here and the water helps extinguish the fire," he says, pointing to the front of the small transport device.
The uniformed officers place the robots on a van and a trailer. They are going to escort them to a nearby route, still far from the area of confrontations, but already under the control space of the drones. For this reason, a soldier equipped with a cartridge rifle is placed in the rear. Dream also sticks his machine gun out the window.
"If a drone appears, we all jump out of the car and run in opposite directions, okay?" he explains before starting the journey.
After a tense route where some blackened remains of cars that failed to avoid UAV surveillance can be seen, the team brakes in the middle of an almost deserted road. The quartet gets out of the SUV with their rifles ready. Always looking at the sky.
"Quickly, quickly!"
It is about staying at the location for as little time as possible. A few months ago one of the members of his group died in a similar operation. His car was hit by a UAV.
The unloading operation of the UGVs takes only a few minutes. Dream and his men don't handle them. They just place them at their starting point. The drivers are several kilometers away, in another location.
An underground, nondescript from the outside, but which houses half a dozen pilots sitting in front of modern plasma screens. They are directed by Yevgeny. The person in charge of this group controls the journey of the three robots while looking at a screen that warns him of threats on the route. They are small icons that appear in the plasma and define the type of enemy drone that is approaching: FPV, Molniya, "unknown".
"These missions usually last between three and eight hours. The robots have three gears. In third gear they reach a maximum of 18 km per hour, but we usually go in first gear," says the commander of the group of UGV pilots.
The robots' cameras show how they travel along roads where the destroyed bodies of vehicles follow one another. Also many UGVs. "Robots usually don't go beyond half a dozen missions. They don't live more than a week," says Yevgeny.
It's like watching a video game, but real. Cameras and microphones allow the war to be seen and heard from a distance. Shootings and explosions are heard. One of the UGVs passes by a burning car. "They have hit him now, before he was not like this," says one of the soldiers.
Another of the robots comes across a group of dogs, which begin to bark, uncomfortable with the movement of the mechanical contraption.
One of the "drivers" is Marina, a 45-year-old Ukrainian, who has not forgotten about flirtation. She puts her hair in a bun and controls the controls with her red-painted nails.
Suddenly, Yevgeny urges him to stop. "Stop, stop!" There are two FPVs on the screen. Very close to your path. "We stop the robot. It's like those who play 'dead' to mislead the murderer," says the head of the group.
The triple mission of Yevgeny and his team consists of supplying other units, but in Donbas the robots already fight with machine guns or act as mobile bombs. The technicians under the orders of Andriy, known as The Magician - he made his living as a conjurer before 2022 - are capable of converting these structures into kamikaze machines.
"We put two of these cabbages on them (it is the name in the local dialect for two artillery shells) and we make a Russian salad," comments Denice, an engineer like Andriy, with a certain macabre irony.
The massive use of UAVs and UGVs have subverted the entire war strategy and makes lightning-fast tank and infantry offensives impossible.
For this reason, experts doubt that Moscow's troops will be able to comply with the new ultimatum issued by Putin.
Far from the end
The Institute for the Study of War has recalled that the top Russian leader has established no less than 15 deadlines for his capture since February 2022. "In practice, Russia is not achieving on the battlefield its objective of seizing the rest of Donetsk by the end of 2026," read the analysis of that think tank on the 6th.
"At the rate of their current advance, Russian forces will not take the rest of the region until 2032, if at all," the text added.
The head of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Shamil Krutkov, agrees with this analysis. For him, "we are still very far from the final battle" for control of Donbas. "The situation in Kramatorsk has worsened but the first drone with fiber optics appeared here eight months ago. Then everyone said that in three months this town would be paralyzed but it continues to live," he says.
"The same thing happened in Dobropila and Konstantinivka (two towns near Kramatorsk). The Russians entered them and were expelled. Now there are about 150 Russians in Konstantinivka but Ukraine controls that city," he says.
Krutkov believes that the main purpose of the repeated Russian bombings of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk is "to generate fear in the population. They are achieving that. Many people are leaving. But they have no military sense."
The young military leader - he is only 28 years old - expresses himself in a room that houses a photographic exhibition about the long history of this military unit. The 93rd Mechanized Brigade was established shortly after the country's independence. Soldiers from this group participated as blue helmets in conflicts such as those in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Lebanon. The war later caught them in their own country.
The soldiers of the 93rd fought from 2014 in battles as symbolic as the one at the Donetsk airport. The photos in the small museum recall their presence in the bloodiest battles of the new phase of the war, which began with the general invasion of Russia in 2022: Bakhmut, Pokrovsk, Soledar...
"The original museum was partially destroyed by a bombing recently. This is what we have saved," explains Dimitro, a graphic artist, former hippie and now military man, who is dedicated to creating installations with war paraphernalia for this curious venue.
The museum's photos focus on the years 2022, 2023 and 2024. They are snapshots of a war that is no longer seen: tanks firing, a soldier using a drum machine gun, an anti-tank RPG. Dimitro's latest work, however, does not ignore the new reality. It is a creation based on an amalgamation of drone casings. "It's not finished," he says.
Shamil Krutkov explains that the difference between the 2014 war and the current one is what separates two universes. Dimitro, who fought in those years, is more explicit: "then you could be in a trench, shooting at Russians hiding in another trench, 25 meters from yours. That is already unimaginable."
The Brigade's top military chief agrees that "drones and robots are replacing soldiers. 80% of our logistics missions are already carried out by robots. Once a week we also launch an assault with robots."
"Europe does not understand this change," he concludes.
Leuchenko's police officers also defend the big band
