The drone pilots had almost reached their position under cover of darkness when they heard the buzzing sound that every soldier in Ukraine dreads. “We threw ourselves on the ground and I glimpsed a green light. Then it exploded,” says Samokat (Scooter). “I stood up and looked to see if my arms and legs were still attached. I saw two comrades crawling and I pulled them to the dugout. Then I went back for the others.”
I am sitting at a table in a house in Donetsk oblast, about 40km from Russian lines. The single-storey bungalow has a walled garden and ferocious guard dogs. Its inhabitants, the Hellish Hornets drone reconnaissance platoon, rotate to several dugouts on the front line, 8km from the Russians.
“Everyone wants to be a drone pilot now,” says a soldier whose call sign is Viking. “It’s better than assaulting, but it’s not safer, because drone pilots are the Russians’ number one target.”
An estimated 70 per cent of casualties on both sides are caused by exploding FPV (First Person View) “suicide drones” such as the one that wounded Scooter last week. Rotations are the most dangerous time.
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Soldiers from the Hellish Hornets and other units in the 54th Mechanised Brigade come and go over the course of several hours. “You out of the hospital already?” one asked when Scooter walked in. They laugh at his call sign, because the Ukrainian word means something like “self-propelled board”. Scooter earned his nickname by crashing a home-made scooter.
Several drone pilots were wounded by the exploding drone last week. At platoon headquarters, Lieut Yulia Mykytenko alerted the company medic who decided that the two most badly wounded should be evacuated immediately to Kharkiv.
I have known Lieut Mykytenko for two years. She and I wrote a series of articles together for The Irish Times, but this is the first time I have met the men she calls “my boys”.
Scooter stayed behind with the walking wounded. “When you are attacked, you get such a rush of adrenalin that you may not know you are wounded,” he explains. It is possible to bleed to death, for example from a femoral artery, if you don’t realise you’re wounded. He and a comrade undressed and inspected each other’s bodies. The men laugh uproariously. Laughter, their company commander tells me later, is the best antidote to stress.
“There was another drone explosion near us, so we waited underground for a couple of hours,” Scooter continues. “They sent a second Humvee for us. The Humvees are slower than a pickup, but at least they are armoured.”
I hadn’t noticed Lieut Mykytenko enthroned on a black vinyl car seat in the middle of the large, cluttered room. “Scooter is being modest,” she interrupts. “He stayed with the wounded on the battlefield when he didn’t have to.”
Scooter served in an infantry assault group before joining the Hellish Hornets. “The longer you fight, the scarier it gets,” he says. “I lost two close comrades in the assault unit. Dima was killed in a Wagner attack in 2023. Foma was hit by a mortar when he was assaulting in 2024. We feel very sad, but we have to keep going.”
For how long? I ask Scooter. I hear Mykytenko’s voice in the background: “The president says ‘until victory’.” The men burst into laughter again.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s independence day speech on the Maidan in Kyiv on Sunday rang true: “We hear from the enemy every day: ‘There is no such state, there is no such nation.’ And every day, we prove the opposite. We prove that Ukrainians exist. Ukrainians will remain on this land.”
Polyak (Polish) worked as a labourer in the Netherlands, Germany and Poland until the full-scale invasion in February 2022. He was given his call sign because he arrived from Poland to join the army. “I fly Mavic drones to find fa**ots, and I find a lot of them,” he says. “I report to other units, and they decide what (kind of explosives) to send to them.”
“Fa**ots” is one of the soldiers’ favourite epithets for Russians. “FR” for “effing Russians” is another.
[ The Irish Times view on the war in Ukraine: for all his bluster, Putin is losingOpens in new window ]
Polyak and his comrades know it is Independence Day weekend. “I don’t know how to celebrate it,” he says plaintively. “Maybe when the war is over. This is a surreal situation. Slaves came to conquer a free people and called it liberation.”
Polyak admits to “a kind of burnout” from the repetitive, seemingly endless war. He is 36 years old. “I see my health depleting. My spine is suffering. I have hernias.”
Donald Trump’s failed promise to impose sanctions on Russia this summer raised some hopes, but not among the Hellish Hornets. “It’s strange to see two old farts decide the fate of a young nation,” Polyak says, referring to the August 15th Trump-Putin summit. “And [Trump] wants a Nobel Prize? Putin wants to be ‘the unifier of Russian lands’? Putin’s been in power for 25 years. I think he got bored. He built a war machine, and he wants to play with it like a toy.”
A loud explosion shakes the house. “It’s probably a glide bomb, several kilometres away,” says Viking. A second explosion, louder and closer. The Russians wait a few minutes to allow rescue teams to arrive, then bomb again to kill a maximum number of people, the soldiers explain. Perhaps 10 minutes later we hear a half dozen explosions in rapid succession. “It’s probably Kramatorsk,” Viking says.
“It’s a cluster bomb,” says a heavyset soldier whose call sign is Radio. “There’s a big explosion and then it sounds like marbles hitting the floor.”
Polyak tells me about Kasper, one of a dozen men from the same company who were killed in a Russian tank assault on the village of Spirne in 2022. “I miss him as a comrade. He’s dead. What’s there to weep about? I have seen so much death that I’m used to death. Over time you become numb.”
The company commander, known as Tyson, arrives with a few more soldiers. The Hellish Hornets are one of six platoons, about 120 men, under the 25-year-old captain’s orders. Tyson decided to join the army at age 14, when the Russians invaded his native Luhansk. His mother and sister escaped when the Russians took their village in 2022, but his grandmother stayed. The FSB (intelligence service) have visited his granny. Tyson does not contact her, for fear of putting her in danger.
[ Frustrated Trump threatens Russia sanctions if no progress on Ukraine peace dealOpens in new window ]
Seven years in the army have given Tyson a sixth sense, he says. What, I ask, is his premonition? “It’s not positive regarding the situation.” Media reports say Russian forces are inching forward in Donetsk, albeit while taking huge losses. “They haven’t captured as much land as western media say, but more than Ukrainian media report,” he says. Manpower is the greatest problem, since Russia has a population three to four times that of Ukraine. Tyson complains that Russia “impoverishes its people” to pay huge recruitment bonuses.
Like the soldiers under his command, Tyson rejects Putin’s demand – which Donald Trump appears to agree with – that Russia be awarded all of Donbas, including the quarter of Donetsk still in Ukrainian hands, which Tyson’s men have sacrificed so much to hold on to. “We need to keep the part of Donbas we still hold for as long as we can,” Tyson says. “If we give it up now, we will be in terrible trouble, because this part of Donetsk is hilly, with villages. It has been a fortress line since 2014. If we give it up, the Russians will have an open gate to the rest of the country.”
Tyson’s worst day occurred at a place called Olhynka in the spring of 2022, when his best friend, the man he had asked to be the godfather of his first child, was shot in a skirmish and later died of his wounds.
“I wanted to rescue him. If you know someone who is wounded but you may be killed, you are not supposed to rescue them. I was young and I tried to save him. I was shot in the left hip. The doctor said I would never walk again. I still walk with a limp, and I still feel pain. They would give me a prosthetic hip, but I cannot afford to take six months off.”
Tyson’s happiest day occurred this year when his company extracted a unit from a besieged village after months of fighting. “The Russians took the village later, but we saved our men,” he says. “Our number one priority is saving our men. That’s the difference: they don’t care at all. I think they lost a whole brigade, several thousand killed and wounded, to take that village.”
Ukraine fights not only for itself, Tyson concludes. “We are fighting as our ancestors did in the Middle Ages, but this time it is the Russians who are the Mongol horde. We are doing everything we can to ensure that you Europeans see war only on your television screens.”
