We are soaring over Russia. The sky is crystalline. I see patchworks of fields. Smears of hedgerow and bursts of forest dot the landscape — a pastoral scene of near prelapsarian tranquillity.
Far below, a Russian soldier ambles into view. ‘Burn motherf****r, burn,’ murmurs the man next to me.
I am in a base not far from the front lines in the Kharkiv Oblast, or region, of eastern Ukraine. And I’m watching through the camera of a drone — looking for targets to kill.
It’s an extraordinary scene. No journalist has ever been given access to this base before.
‘The most top-secret thing I can show you is where we are now — the most secret place in Kharkiv,’ says Leonid Maslov with a laugh. A reconnaissance platoon commander, Maslov is my guide for the day.
If Ukraine is to push Moscow’s forces from the region, the drone wars are where much of the battle will be won or lost
Alongside us are members of the intelligence unit of the 92nd Assault Brigade, commonly known as ‘Ivan Sirko’ after a 17th-century Cossack military leader revered in Ukraine for his defiance of the Ottoman sultan.
It’s fitting. Here the Ukrainians take the war directly into Russia — and they love it. Maslov in particular.
Since 2022, he has devoted his life to one thing: killing Russians.
He will need to kill many more if Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, is to hold out. The region is now the scene of the most intense fighting in Ukraine.
The latest enemy offensive began on May 10, when Russian forces started pounding the Ukrainian positions from the air.
They have surged into the Oblast and, according to Ukraine’s Commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, have ‘expanded the zone of active hostilities by almost 70 kilometers’ or 43 miles.
Now, the Russians are closing in on the towns and villages around the city of Kharkiv itself, notably the village of Lyptsi and, to its east, the border town of Vovchansk, which both sides are fighting to control. These places offer high ground and lie close to rivers — a combination that offers military advantage and ease of logistical support.
For reasons of military security, I cannot describe the secret drone base in detail. Situated somewhere outside Kharkiv, a dirt path leads into a thicket of shrubbery and trees before a rusting steel gate marks its entrance.
Once inside the compound we must ‘limit our exposure’, I am told. That means running from the car in which we arrived across open ground. Our destination is an enclosed rectangular area covered with the detritus of war: wires, sandbags, splintered wooden crates, general rubble and, in one corner, laid out in a ragged row, the constituent parts of a crashed drone.
In the centre of this area sits a large silver van.
It’s incongruous and I am confused — until Maslov grabs a handle and slides back the door to reveal something astonishing: a drone command centre.
Inside, three men sit sideways along the length of the van in sports car-style seats welded to the floor. They are looking at two monitors, one of which is split-screen.
Each man has a large military laptop, too.
Maslov laughs as he sees my surprise and motions skywards. ‘We need all this secrecy because they [enemy drones] are constantly above,’ he says. ‘They are always trying to kill us.’
‘I will show you how we “sniff” them with our special machine. We call it Sugar Baby.’
His colleague Ivan brings out a small black box with an aerial.
‘All drones emit information via signals,’ continues Maslov.
‘Once an enemy drone comes into range, Sugar Baby intercepts its signal — “sniffs” it as we say — and learns what type it is and, via the intensity of the signal, approximately how far away it is,’ he explains.
‘What if it’s near?’ I ask
‘Then it’s time to sit very, very still.’
I look at Maslov staring at his screen, watching the drone fly. On his right hip he has a Glock pistol in a holster, on his lap a keyboard.
This, it strikes me, is 21st-century warfare in a single image.
He sees me looking and grins. The gun, he tells me, was a gift from the Ukrainian ministry of defence and was presented to him by the popular former commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
Members of the intelligence unit of the 92nd Assault Brigade, commonly known as ‘Ivan Sirko’, sit in a van hosting a drone command centre
David Patrikarakos, in a secret location, says this is the live streaming of war — conflict as spectacle
‘I got it because I was so good at killing the Nelyudi [inhumans],’ he tells me with yet another grin.
If Ukraine is to push Moscow’s forces from the region, the drone wars are where much of the battle will be won or lost.
Small and cheap, drones are particularly well-suited to destroying large, expensive technology. Perfect for cash-poor Ukraine.
Then there is targeting. With ammunition scarce, Kyiv needs to be accurate. Drones are sent up to find the enemy positions — and their co-ordinates are relayed to the Ukranian artillery.
This is what I’ve come to see.
The men with me have no illusions about the size of the job they face. The Russians are smart, they tell me, and are excellent at electronic warfare.
‘They have a system, which they call “Valkyrie”’, Ivan explains by way of an example. ‘It collects the names of Wi-Fi hotspots and compares them with [potential] locations. As you can see our Wi-Fi [which I cannot name] has a name that would fit another sort of location entirely.’
Since May 10, the Russians have jammed Ukraine’s connections to Starlink — a ‘constellation’ of satellites owned by Elon Musk — and in doing so maimed Kyiv’s reconnaissance capability. ‘They have jammed our GPS, so we control the drone manually,’ explains Maslov. He taps into his keyboard and the drone visible on one of the main screens adjusts its position.
It is a fixed wing machine, the Polish FlyEye — one of the best the unit has. Each one costs a minimum of 150,000 euros — and that increases to 700,000 euros for a drone with full kit, including equipment for the control station on the ground.
The Ukrainians have other tricks to confuse the enemy. They cannot match the Russians in numbers of drones, but scarcity breeds creativity and I am seeing that now.
On the neighbouring screen, I see a message that reads ‘Warning: Spoofing’.
‘We have satellites in the sky — and they are giving false positions of our drones,’ continues Maslow.
‘See, our drone is here.’ He points to the map that now takes up part of a screen. ‘But the satellite says it’s here.’ He shows us another part of the map entirely.
‘This is spoofing.’
Then comes one of the biggest shocks in my entire time reporting on the war in Ukraine. Today, I am told, the drone is flying on reconnaissance to see what ‘the bastards to our north are doing.’
It takes a second for the full import of this to sink in: we are going into Russia.
Putin claims that he doesn’t want to conquer Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and that the latest offensive is intended merely to create a ‘buffer zone’ to protect Russian border areas — notably the city of Belgorod, which is only 45km from Ukraine — from exactly the sort of incursion and attack that I am about to witness.
The unit is looking for vehicles or infantry, anything they can find and take out. An orange band now curves across the top of one of the screens.
‘This is the range of their missiles,’ explains Maslov. ‘From there they can shoot down our drones.’
An undulating white line further down is the Russian border. A few miles below that is the front line.
Maslov explains that the whole area is covered by Russia’s Mavic drones. This is a feature of modern conflict: near total coverage of key battlefield areas, digitally and visually.
Increasingly, war is a game of hide and seek — and drones together with Artificial Intelligence are at the heart of it.
I see our drone cross the white line on the screen. We are now inside Russia.
It is flying at an altitude of 1,400 metres over vast, seemingly empty, fields.
‘The Russians are hidden well here,’ says a third man, Sasha, thoughtfully. The drone camera pans to where smoke billows from some trees, the aftermath from an apparent strike.
‘We can see where they were though,’ he jokes.
A convoy of three vehicles comes into view. ‘Looks medical,’ says Sasha. They move on.
We zoom down onto a patch of forest to find four trucks with camouflage netting amid the foliage. They are military vehicles carrying electronic warfare systems. Fair game.
‘They’ll be dead this night,’ laughs Maslov. ‘We will take them out with bomber drones.’ Ivan starts singing in Ukrainian, joyously.
A jeep appears on the screen and Maslov leans in to look more closely. ‘I want to see where this is going,’ he tells me. ‘It looks like a commander could be coming. Look at how the jeep is not stopped at any of the checkpoints.’
The drone footage is so clear that, even from almost one mile up in the air, the Ukrainians can make out that it’s a Soviet-era UAZ model.
They watch it drive along a main road — noting a right-hand turn, a dirt track, ahead.
‘Will he turn right?’ asks Maslov excitedly. ‘I reckon he will turn right.’
He turns right. The men whoop.
‘He will show us the tanks,’ says Maslov. ‘And the artillery,’ says Ivan.
The jeep pulls into the edge of woodland. A man gets out and starts walking to meet another man. They hug, clearly comfortable with each other.
‘Ah, temporarily alive Russian soldiers,’ says Maslov.
That’s when he calls the unit with the killer drones and gives them the co-ordinates of the site we’re watching.
It’s been decided to wait until nightfall to take them out, Maslov tells me.
Ukrainian soldier fire artillery in the direction of Bakhmut
I realise I am watching these men’s last day on this earth. Soon, death will find them from the skies, and they have no idea. This is the live streaming of war — conflict as spectacle.
Mission accomplished, our drone begins the journey home. Today, I understood first-hand that this is how Kyiv most effectively hurts Moscow, by striking it at home.
Yet still Washington insists that any weaponry it supplies cannot be used to enter or attack Russian territory.
Still the Ukrainians are forced to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.
This is an egregious mistake, and as long as it continues, any sort of victory will remain out of reach.
Russia will remain a threat, able to menace not only Ukraine but also Europe, and the wider West.
It’s time to unshackle Ukraine. Finally, we have given them the tools. Now, let them finish the job.