DAVID PATRIKARAKOS watches Russian soldiers’ last days on Earth from a hidden nerve center no reporter has ever visited. And is astonished by what he sees…
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
third man, Sasha, thoughtfully. The drone camera pans to where smoke billows from some trees, the aftermath from an apparent strike.
reckon he will turn right.’
He turns right. The men whoop.
‘He will show us the tanks,’ says Maslov. ‘And the artillery,’ says Ivan.
That was a gripping article and enjoyable to read.
One must question the decision by commanders to allow this piece. I hope there is nothing in it that can benefit the orc scum. As the soldiers in this article reiterate: putinaZis unfortunately are not stupid. It will take a tremendous effort to defeat them.
I agree, it is interesting to read. But, I haven’t seen anything that could be of use for the roaches.
The very last part of this report says it all. Ukraine is still forced to fight with an arm tied behind its back because of a couple of decision makers that were born without any spines or scrotum sacks.