Olexander appears with long hair, surfer glasses, Davidoff cigars, creative uniformity, and a drone the size of a chandelier. The drone operators not only design their own patches for all members: now the pilots also do it individually. Olexander gives us his own logo, which we can attach with Velcro to our backpack, and shows us the t-shirts he prints with his own war name or callsign, El Montero, referring to the hunter who participates in hunts, printed in golden letters with the motto written in Spanish: "Good morning, pidars (a derogatory term in Ukrainian)".
El Montero is a drone pilot and partners with Dmitro, who used to be a sniper. One operates the observation drone and the other, the kamikaze, which is launched at full speed towards the target. In other words, one locates the target and the other takes it down, just like sniper and observer pairs. "I was bored of being a sniper. Before, I could only shoot Russian soldiers in rare situations. I spent my days hidden in a position. Now I can attack them daily. I won't tell you my numbers of Russians taken down, but I will tell you that our unit is one of the most successful on this front," Dmitro says.
These two Ukrainian soldiers are part of that vanguard, those Top Gun pilots trying to stop the Russians on all battlefronts, at the cost of causing huge losses to their infantry and armored vehicles. To combat them, the Russians also send their best drone units against them, in a technological battle that resembles gunfighter duels at the OK Corral, but from a distance. "Now we have in front of our positions a group of Russian pilots who won the military drone skills championship, meaning they have sent us an elite group to hunt us down while we hunt them. This is a duel in the sun, but remote-controlled," Olexander explains. Pilots on both sides search for their enemies on platforms like Facebook to gather as much information as possible and know their profiles.
Although drones are operated remotely, the casualties are real. Both sides search for their enemies' hidden positions for days until the appearance of enemy drones gives them away. Then a swarm of these devices bursts into the shelters with their terrifying sound and explosive warheads.
When the war started, volunteers signing up at recruitment centers requested positions like artillery, tanks, or assault infantry. Now, new recruits all want to be drone pilots, perceived as the new heroes of this war, not only for the damage to the enemy, but also for their ability to transport food, medicine, or ammunition to the most compromised frontline positions without those soldiers having to expose themselves in open fields.
The recent success of the attack against the Russian fleet of strategic bombers with cheap kamikaze drones has once again put these pilots at the forefront of the war against Russia. Unlike the Ukrainian or Russian frontline soldier, facing conditions similar to those in World War II, the drone pilot is not as close to the trenches, can see the enemy before the enemy sees them, and is vital for the defense of their comrades.
Some drone pilots are becoming true war stars: former techno music DJ Artem Timofeev, alleged mastermind of Operation Spiderweb, alongside former Ukrainian tennis player Alexander Dolgopolov, who reached number 13 on the ATP list and now operates combat drones, are two of the most well-known, but other anonymous ones like Darwin, Strilok, Robert Magiar Brovdi, or Andrii Skyba Skibin have each achieved hundreds of enemy casualties.
The gamification of war has led the Ukrainian Ministry of Technology to launch an interesting initiative: an internal competition that awards six points for a dead Russian, 20 for hitting an armored vehicle, 30 for destroying an armored vehicle...
The technological combat is such that every day both armies fight to penetrate the brains of enemy drones, see what they see, and ultimately hijack the device's controls to launch it against its former owners. This happens in front of us at the drone workshop of Capellán, a sergeant who, after a few minutes of hacking, shows on the screen what a Russian observation drone sees over Ukrainian positions. After a bit more work, the sergeant gains control and crashes it to the ground.
Ukrainian commander Olexander Yabchanka, leader of the Da Vinci Wolves assault unit, speaks admirably of one of his drone pilots: "This guy has over 400 confirmed kills. And now we are going to focus on doing the same with ground drones," he says, twisting his Cossack mustache. "We are facing the biggest military revolution since the invention of gunpowder," he concludes.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian entrepreneurs and start-uppers like Oleksiy Babenko, founder and CEO of 24-year-old Vyriy Drone company, produce hundreds of fiber optic drones per day, capable of attacking from 40 kilometers away. "We are in contact with drone pilots. They test the models in combat and tell us how we can improve them. It's as if they work for us. And we work for them."