A voice from the kill zone

A fighter named Viktor, a sergeant in the anti-aircraft division of one of the brigades defending Kostyantynivka, shows me a video of a large explosion in the middle of a row of half-destroyed houses. For a few seconds, a drone appears in the frame. “Here it is, it looks like a whole airplane. It is like a big bomb, it could take out half a house!” he says.

He makes me a cup of tea in a half-litre plastic cup. “I no longer drink coffee or tea now, I’m on energy drinks!” Viktor says, and I notice his bloodshot eyes.

Having previously only spoken on the phone, we finally come face to face with each other in Kramatorsk, a city that lies some 20km from the frontline in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. His company specialises in intercepting incoming foreign objects: reconnaissance drones, Shahed drones, and the latest-generation video piloted drones that fly towards their target guided by a remote operator. 

Viktor is monitoring the brigade’s area of responsibility by watching a livestream from a drone flying somewhere over the outskirts of Kostyantynivka on his smartphone. Though there’s no enemy in sight today, this kind of monitoring goes on around the clock, with drone pilots working in shifts and taking over from one another. Any Russian assault groups spotted from the air are dealt with immediately.

Viktor shows me a recording taken the previous day, in which two Russian soldiers can be seen riding on the same motorbike when a device explodes next to them, throwing them off their vehicle. One soldier goes up in flames, as the other one looks on in bewilderment for a second before running for the roadside.

“He saw a bicycle there and rode off on it. We got him later as well. But how can he just stand there and watch his fellow soldier burn? He didn’t do a thing to help! Whom are we even fighting?”

Before we meet, Viktor warns me that he can’t give out any details about his brigade or its position, or any other details at the tactical level. But he is willing to talk about the war, and what he has seen on the front line in his fourth year of fighting. 

*

Viktor comes from a small town in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, and enlisted to fight when the full-scale Russian invasion of his country began in 2022. He first fought in Bakhmut, firing at Russian assault aircraft with portable shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, holding sectors of the embattled city from the rooftops of apartment blocks, something he now recalls with a hint of nostalgia.

“In 2022 I used to walk to my position on foot, everything was brought up to it by vehicle, they would cover it with a net and we could work calmly all day,” he laughs. “And in the evening a vehicle would come and take everything and everyone away!”

The war is completely different now, Viktor says: “it’s an all-out drone war”. The mass use of drones has blurred the very notion of a front line and instead created a kill zone, which extends anywhere between 5km–15km back from the line of contact itself. “If there’s a lot of enemy activity in their area, they destroy everything that moves within their kill zone, just as we do.”

Viktor no longer has a vehicle of his own, as it came under fire while he was delivering ammunition to another post. “Right now, the hardest thing isn’t the fighting itself; it’s getting into a position and then getting out again. If you don’t draw attention to yourself at the position, if you’re well camouflaged and follow all the safety rules, then you can more or less survive.”

“The most important thing is camouflage!” he continues. “It’s not like 2022–2023 any more, when they were blasting entire areas with an unimaginable number of shells, they could fire 60,000 or 70,000 shells per day back then. There was an impact every 30 seconds, I don’t know how we survived.”

“But on the other hand, there weren’t so many drones. It was enough to shoot down an Orlan reconnaissance drone, and then the Russians were firing blind.”

“Now we’re roughly at parity, 10,000, 15,000, 17,000 per day… And now they don’t fire at whole areas, only if they’ve identified something. Everything else, assaults and so on, is all accompanied by drones.”

The Russian advance in the region continues, and in early December, the Kremlin announced the capture of Pokrovsk, a major logistics hub for the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), though there was no official confirmation of the city’s fall from Ukraine. Another major city where fighting is currently under way is nearby Kostyantynivka.

“Right now everything is being decided: if we hold Kostyantynivka and they don’t break through, the Russians will find themselves in a very difficult position. Their positions are on flat ground, they won’t enter the city, and they’ll be freezing.”

“Why are they so desperate to get into Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka?” Viktor asks rhetorically, “because winter is coming! In winter it’s incredibly hard out in the open, unbelievably hard, starting with logistics. Whatever drives over the ground leaves tracks in the snow straight away: where a vehicle drove at night, where it stopped, where people walk, where they’ve trampled the snow at the entrance to a dugout,” he continues.

That’s why it’s crucial to hold Kostyantynivka before the winter frosts and snow set in. But the fighting in the city is complicated by the fact that there are still civilians there.

“You see, in a city like Kostyantynivka, I’m supposed to fire at any movement… And suddenly I find, right next to my position, that there are eight people in the basement of a former five-storey block! I ask them what they’re doing there. They say they’re ‘guarding their home’. I take one of them by the hand, lead him outside, show him his building and point out the fact that only the first two floors of the block are intact, and I ask him: ‘What exactly are you guarding?’”

According to official figures, at least 4,500 civilians remain in Kostyantynivka.

*

Viktor’s entire life is the war. He hears echoes of what’s happening in Kyiv without paying much attention: the enemy is ahead, the enemy is in Russia, and right now, the enemy must be fought off. That’s it.

“They say they found more than $4 million in some minister’s flat? We could really use that money here,” he suddenly remarks, recounting the recent news that several Ukrainian ministers were being investigated over a lucrative kickback scheme involving the country’s main energy provider Ukrenergo.

We step outside. It’s November, and it gets dark early. Occasional rumbles can be heard somewhere in the distance, and, sometimes, short bursts of gunfire too, though that might be coming from the nearby training ground. These days, experienced “old” brigades often train small groups of recently arrived reinforcements themselves. There are no large concentrations of recruits that could serve as targets for Russian ballistic missiles, but there are seasoned instructors with real combat experience and a chance to get a proper look at the newcomers.

“Of course, we’re taking everyone they send us now, but still, you have to understand that I might not be particularly welcoming to you,” Viktor explains. “People aged 50+ have different cognitive abilities; those tiny, millimetre-precise movements of the levers on the controller just don’t come naturally to them.”

Age is a sensitive subject for Viktor too: he’s 37 now, and he entered the war when he was just shy of 33, having recently returned from working abroad and buying a flat to renovate with his wife. The couple had no time for children before the war, and there were also health issues to contend with.

Four years of war have passed since then, years that Russia has stolen from them, years in which they each have grown older. Viktor says it would be wrong to bequeath a war like this to his children and grandchildren, before suddenly falling silent.