Kiev—Here, it is impossible to evade the drones. Reminders of their presence are everywhere. Ads posted deep in the underground metro stations depict quadcopters whirring above the heads of faceless soldiers. A slogan proclaims: “The drones always come first.” A billboard in the Maidan, the city’s central square, shows a young man stroking a drone as if it were a golden retriever. It exhorts the potential recruit: “Become a drone operator today.” Signs posted at gas stations glorify the work of drone units. Disposable coffee cups feature drone cartoons. Men keep drone parts on their desks. Women wear drone hardware as jewelry. Children play at drones in school and on the street. Drones, drones, drones—they’re all anyone can think about.
With good reason, too. When night falls, the drones come out to play. Not the Ukrainian ones, of course. Those are at the front lines. The city is instead swarmed by Shaheds, kamikaze drones designed in Iran, sent in waves almost every day from Russian territory. Since 2022, when the war began in earnest, thousands of Shaheds loaded with explosives have crash-landed into the buildings and streets of the Ukrainian capital. Frequent drone attacks—as well as ballistic missile strikes—have left Kiev’s already grim skyline pockmarked with ruin. The city is also subject to rolling blackouts, the result of Russian hits on power plants, gas refineries, other critical infrastructure. Everyone who can afford one runs a backup generator; those who cannot, burn candles at night. The majority of air raid alerts are announced via app: A smartphone is critical for survival. If you miss a notification, you may get caught in a firestorm.
During the first days of the war, most Kievans were scared out of their wits. Russian tanks from Belarus rolled into the suburbs and, for a few weeks, held the city under siege. But that’s ancient history. These days the tanks lie rusting on the side of the highway, and nobody is cowering in his apartment. Of course the danger hasn’t passed. The drones buzz in at odd hours, blow windows out of buildings, torch cars in the street. But at this point the city’s residents hardly notice. They are desensitized to the threat of death from above, and, anyway, life goes on. Kiev has in fact acquired a certain joie de vivre. It was a party town before the war; it is a party town now. And, as the fighting enters its fourth year, the whole city is reeling with a giddy unease, the delirium of someone who has hung out for too long by the gallows.
Almost as soon as I arrive, I catch the city’s fever. Along with a group of other American journalists, I resolve to stay out drinking all night, or at least until the police enforce the city’s 12:00 A.M. curfew. This is not a difficult thing to do. There are plenty of bars in the city, some of which play fast and loose with the rules. The first one we visit, The Cinematographer’s Party, seems promising. It is a dingy place in a dingy part of town. On one side of the street is a deteriorating Baroque Revival apartment complex; on the other is an equally decayed Brutalist behemoth. By the time we get there, the evening’s revelries are well underway. Outside, people are smoking. Some appear to be teenagers. Under the lintel of an adjoining building’s entrance, two young women are kissing passionately, pawing at each other for warmth underneath their open parkas.
Inside, the bar is covered in garish décor. On the walls hang nude sketches that appear to have been drawn by a palsied follower of Modigliani. On the tables, lace doilies and electric candles. The staff members are all wearing leopard print vests. Tonight’s poison is rail drinks. That has never been my style, so I order a glass of Fernet-Branca, which earns me a polite scowl from my bartender and raised eyebrows from the other patrons. I quickly learn that almost everyone in here is also an American—the guy slugging rum and Coke next to me confesses that he is from Omaha, Nebraska—and that most of the Ukrainians have taken their drinks outside for a smoke break. With apologies to my countrymen, I join them.
Although I gave up cigarettes two years ago, I cannot refuse Iryna, a woman about my age, when she offers me a Sobranie. She has an affected elegance about her, with her long coat and leather gloves, and I soon understand why. Before the war, she worked in cultural development; now she is involved in the humanitarian effort. Her current job is important, she concedes, but it is not as enjoyable as the one before. She sighs. Maybe it is just a case of burnout.
“Anyway, I don’t go to the bomb shelter,” she says.
Why not? She has her reasons. She dislikes her neighbors; she hates getting up in the middle of the night; she thinks fleeing to the basement is a bother. So, when there is an air raid, she sleeps in the hallway of her apartment. Many other Kievans do the same, and an informal rule of air raid etiquette has been developed in the past few years. Two walls—that’s enough to protect you from the blast of a Shahed. Obviously, if your air raid app tells you that ballistic missiles are headed your way, that’s a different story: Run for cover as fast as you can.
A little after 11:00 P.M., the bartenders announce last call. A few minutes later, to show that they are serious, they lock the front doors. We still have almost an hour to kill before the city shuts down. Iryna suggests an Irish pub that stays open right until midnight.
“But it is a shitty bar,” she cautions.
So, after a short cab ride, we find ourselves in another dimly lit room. We’ve traded bottom-shelf cocktails for Guinness. Rugby is playing on the television. A group of young men hoot at the spectacle.
“Do you really call this a shitty bar?” I ask.
“In Kiev, we have very high standards,” she deadpans. “I only go here when I really need to get alcohol in me. Speaking of—another drink?”
I demur and make my exit. By the time I arrive back at the hotel, the police have set up checkpoints along the main roads. It is midnight.
Five minutes later, the power cuts. Then my phone blares. ATTENTION. AIR RAID ALERT. PROCEED TO THE NEAREST SHELTER. Hotel guests emerge into the lobby, bleary-eyed and bewildered. Some, annoyed, go back to sleep in their rooms. Others, more cautious, carry their blankets and phone chargers down to the basement. It is going to be a long night. For many, there are longer still ahead.
Such a scene would have been unthinkable a few years ago. But that was before the drones. Everyone knows that because of them, warfare will never be the same. But few acknowledge that civilian life is also irrevocably changed. When the war ends, the drones will still be here. And their lessons, learned over the skies of Kiev, in the disputed regions of eastern Ukraine, in Russia itself, will not be unlearned; they will be exported—they already have been exported—and reduplicated everywhere else. “A world in which people can be routinely and anonymously targeted by unseen enemies is not pleasant to contemplate,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in 2012. And it is even less pleasant to observe. We reshaped our world around the Bomb after World War II. Now we are remaking it again, in the image of the drone.
Drones are not really a new technology. Unmanned aerial vehicles have been used in warfare since the middle of the nineteenth century. Drones, properly speaking, were first deployed during the Vietnam War, when the United States used them in reconnaissance missions. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union employed them pretty much in the same way. Both sides felt a need to spy on the other, but neither wanted an embarrassing repeat of the 1960 U-2 incident. Better to lose a flying camera than a human pilot over enemy territory.
The first use of a drone as a weapon occurred in November 2002, when the C.I.A. ordered a “targeted killing” of a prominent member of al-Qaeda who was traveling with five compatriots in a convoy through the Yemeni countryside. An American operator on the ground in Djibouti launched a Predator U.A.V. armed with Hellfire missiles. When the terrorist’s truck was in its sights, the operator released a missile; it struck the truck; everyone inside exploded.
After this strike, there was significant debate among military officials over the moral implications of such targeted killings. The C.I.A. claimed that it had only authorized the mission because it had been informed that no one except for members of al-Qaeda were in the truck. But what if its information had been wrong? What if someone else had been on board: a woman, a child? Would the C.I.A. still have ordered the hit? And, if it would have, was it willing to accept the consequences: that a brutal, impersonal form of warfare, previously considered off limits, was now fair game?
The answer to that final question turned out to be yes. In the following decade, the U.S. military developed a series of elaborate and expensive programs that to this day conduct hundreds of drone strikes every year. By 2009, there were more than five thousand American drones in the air, and they took part in virtually every military operation. The commander-in-chief, wary of what he euphemistically called “boots on the ground,” preferred this hands-off approach to killing America’s enemies. It was so much easier, cleaner. Instead of constantly sending special-ops teams into hostile territory, he could safely order a few joystick junkies to strafe unsuspecting combatants—and sometimes civilians too—from a comfortable command center in the American Southwest.
Other nations raced to catch up. China, India, Israel, Britain, and the Euro states all developed their own programs and hardware. Their products are not as sophisticated as the hyper-precise Predator and its smaller cousin, the Reaper, but they are no less deadly. And, as many quickly discovered, in most cases sophistication is not necessary. In 2021, one of Iran’s flagship defense contractors, Shahed Aviation Industries, created the Shahed 136, which is basically a low-rent cruise missile. Russia bought them by the pallet. Once its military began regularly bombarding Ukraine with Shaheds, it set up its own factory for copying the drone. (The United States recently announced progress toward its own clone of the Shahed.)
Around the same time, Turkey, which is the world’s leading exporter of military drones, increased production of its Bayraktar TB2, a cut-rate version of the Reaper. On the eve of the war with Russia, the Turks sold about twenty Bayraktars to Ukraine. They were a viral success. Gone were the days of hand-wringing over targeted killings: This was a cultural sensation. Bayraktars featured prominently in government propaganda; they were the subject of a patriotic pop song; and, for a brief moment, “Bayraktar” was a popular pet name.
But as the war drags on, enthusiasm for high-tech drones has cooled. Both Russia and Ukraine discovered that while these devices are effective in long-range situations, on the battlefield there are much simpler ways to bloody your enemy. All you really need is a little bomb attached to a cheap quadcopter. So, for nearly four years now, the two armies have been flinging explosive scraps of metal at each other, across battle lines that have not meaningfully shifted. Russia has the advantage of more manpower and readier access to military resources. Ukraine is nimbler and innovates faster. Neither side is truly winning; there is no end in sight. The battle lines are not even lines, properly speaking, but rather a ten-mile-wide “kill zone” patrolled by drones on the ground and in the air. There, human beings cannot hope to survive.
It is with the kill zone in mind that I visit Killhouse Academy, the Ukrainian army’s premier school for drone operators. It is run by the Third Assault Brigade, the Ukrainian equivalent of Delta Force, in a blacked-out warehouse in one of Kiev’s industrial districts. The school offers a one-week basic piloting course (with an extra week of training for the exceptionally gifted), and it is so popular with soldiers that there is an eight-month waiting list for admissions. It is also fairly secretive: Only after my group of journalists has traveled around Kiev and its environs for a few days do its commanders consent to a tour.
It is easy to see why the brigade hesitated to open its doors to a bunch of journalists. Most military outfits, not wanting to be perceived as bloodthirsty, describe their actions in the noble language of defense. But there is no moral preening here. Soldiers sign up because they want to kill, and Third Assault is happy to teach them. Killhouse has been the subject of fervid attention from both the U.S. and European militaries, which have sent representatives to study its curricula. The hope is that soon Western military academies will adopt its methods.
When we enter the facility, brigade representatives insist that we refrain from taking any pictures of the exercises. Too bad: The place is abuzz with action. Trainees inside the warehouse are fixing up what looks like a very violent Mars rover. The screech of power drills and dance music is deafening. Outside, it is no less noisy. Quadcopters zoom through the air as students guide them toward their target: a hard hat perched on top of a long stick, attached to a remote-controlled truck driving through the tall grass—a simulation of a Russian grunt stalking through a wheat field. The sun is going down, and the land is bathed in pale red light. Were it not for the trainees’ battle fatigues, they could easily be mistaken for sportsmen loading up one last round of clay pigeons before the day’s end.
The actual killhouse is around the corner. It is an indoors obstacle course whose layout is reminiscent of the in-game world of Tron, complete with glowing discs hanging from the ceiling and cybernetic designs stenciled on the walls. Its purpose is to teach drone operators how to navigate their craft successfully through the kill zone and deliver a payload that causes maximum damage to Russian forces. This is no easy task, explains D.C., the instructor on duty. Most guys who pass through his course have never touched a drone before, and, if they have, they don’t know how to use it in a military context.
“There is a difference between freestyle race flying in civilian life and flying like a battle pilot,” he explains. “You have to be able to see through jamming and interference. And you have to understand how to move as slowly as humanly possible, but still outrun your target.”
That does sound difficult, but newbies get a lot of help from more experienced hands. Drone units are usually grouped in fours: a pilot, a wingman, an antenna operator, and an extra man, usually the newest recruit, who fills in for the others when they need him. On the Russian side, it is much the same. In fact, D.C. says, almost everything on the Russian side is organized the same way, down to the training that its pilots receive and the basic hardware they operate. He points to the wall, where a collection of quadcopters are hanging like butterflies pinned to a board. Some of those are Russian models. It makes no difference.
“It’s a completely modular system,” he says. “We just swap and change parts until the drone disappears completely.”
Because of the similarities in design, Russian and Ukrainian troops on the front lines are quite literally tethered to their drones. The quadcopter is an open-source technology, meaning that its blueprints are freely available online, and for that reason it is very easy to jam the signal between joystick and drone. To get around the problem, drone units tie their crafts to the control box with fiber-optic cables. While this solution solves one difficulty, it creates a whole set of new ones. Cables can snag on a tree, disconnect in bad weather, or provide bad signals. But the biggest problem by far is that their limited length leaves drone crews constantly within range of enemy fire.
Pilots must be skilled to survive under these conditions. In D.C.’s experience, the most successful drone operators are rarely just the smartest guys. They have something more than intelligence. They are the ones who give themselves over entirely to the craft, who log thousands and thousands of hours in the field, who, in defiance of the laws of math and physics, become one with their drone. They don’t need to make a calculation to hit a target. They just know when to press the button. This is a job that only a human being can really do well. D.C. is skeptical of artificial intelligence, and, he adds, as long as human beings are killing other human beings, he doesn’t foresee a rise of the machines in warfare.
“I’m a pilot,” he laughs. “I’m egotistical—I want to stay a pilot.”
Across town, in another blacked-out warehouse in another one of Kiev’s industrial districts, Artem Zakharov, an I.T. worker turned defense contractor, is perfecting a product that he thinks could put drone pilots out of business. When we visit his workshop, Zakharov is also cagey about pictures and videos. Not that he is overly secretive. He just knows that if his product falls into the wrong hands it could get him in serious trouble.
Zakharov tells us that he wants to make drones “as smart as possible,” so user-friendly that even an imbecile could score a hit. He says he’s created an unjammable software that when paired with the right hardware is basically unbeatable at short ranges. As he explains the complexities of his invention and how he made it with off-the-shelf components, his phone begins blasting the opening riff of “2 Minutes to Midnight.”
He apologizes—“I appreciate Iron Maiden”—and silences his ringtone.
One of the benefits of unjammable software is that it dispenses with the need for fiber-optic cables. That means that drone units can complete their missions farther away from the kill zone. And it gets better than that, Zakharov says. He has also developed a form of “last-mile guidance”—not quite A.I.—that allows operators to lock in on their targets from a distance, push a button, and let the computer do the rest of work.
“You drink your coffee, or your energy drink, or whatever,” he says. “You point and click—and boom! You don’t even have to use sticks.”
He shows us a reel of videos to demonstrate. They depict drones armed with his software entering close range on multiple Russian targets. Boom, boom, boom—all direct hits. In one of the videos, the drone operator’s face is visible as he zeroes in on a moving truck. He gives over control to the computer. The bomb explodes; the target is in flames; the pilot cheers.
Obviously, Zakharov warns, there are some ethical concerns if this form of drone warfare is widely adopted. An operator clicking a button and then watching the screen is already passive enough. It would not be difficult to automate the process entirely.
“From the technical point of view, that can be done relatively fast,” Zakharov says. “It’s just the question of if we want to go there, because when you open that door, there’s no going back.”
Privately, Zakharov frets about the possibilities of automated combat. He likes to think of himself as a civilized person in a civilized world where he will be held accountable for his actions. And he is hung up on the Geneva Conventions, which state that a decision to attack an enemy must be made by an individual willing to accept responsibility for his orders. How much can his company automate without crossing that line? He doesn’t know, and it worries him: “We don’t want to go to jail after the victory.”
Zakharov acknowledges that not everyone is as scrupulous as he is. He knows of six competitors racing to beat him on this same product. And he is certain that if the Ukrainians are moving toward automated drones, then the Russians are working in that direction too. Plus, there’s outside interest. Zakharov claims that he has a tempting offer from a household-name defense contractor. “A nine-zero investment proposal,” he says. “This is what I have on my table.”
Before we go, Zakharov invites us to the gas station across the street to examine one of his other projects. This one he is happy for us to photograph. When he picked it up on Amazon, it was a toy torpedo. But after tinkering with it in his workshop, he has refashioned it into a counter-Shahed, his own foray into drone-on-drone warfare—and his best attempt to stop the nightly raids on Kiev. He is so proud of it. He beams and holds it up like he has just caught a giant fish. Behind him, a group of women drinking coffee by the gas pumps titter into their sleeves.
The day after we meet with Zakharov, we drive to Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, about seven hours east of Kiev. It is near contested territory, only two and half hours from the front lines, and consequently receives more intense dronings than the capital. The morning we arrive had been particularly bad. More than thirty Shaheds slammed into the city before sunrise, damaging public offices, private businesses, the train station. The local studio of Ukraine’s national broadcasting station was destroyed.
By the time we reach the scene, the building is still smoldering, giving off the stench of gas and burnt rubber. Shaheds fired at close range are often filled with a heavier payload, and this explosion had clearly been a powerful one. Several neighboring apartment buildings are now windowless, and some cars on the street are covered in debris. Firemen are pouring water on the embers. The police have taped off the street to discourage curious gawkers from picking through the wreckage.
I ignore the tape and duck behind the studio. Everything is chaos. The newly homeless are piling up their belongings on the sidewalk: microwaves, sound systems, ancient television sets. An N.G.O. worker is doling out boxes labeled USAID from the back of a van. “The last from the State Department,” he jokes. Someone has leaned a cello against a tree. A man passing by pauses in front of the instrument and flashes the peace sign as he takes a selfie.
In the studio’s parking lot, I meet a local reporter who is filming the damage with a broadcast camera. He motions to me and points at a blackened T.V. truck.
“Here,” he says, indicating the mess of broken wires, converters, headsets, and servers spilling out of its back. “Equipment.”
“There,” he continues, tracing his finger from the truck to a separate pile of debris splayed out about twenty feet away. “Shahed.”
We stare in silence at the twisted scraps of metal. The reporter turns and leaves. Alone, I crouch down and pick up a piece of the fuselage the size of a paperweight. It is oily and smells like a gun range. I stuff it deep in my coat pocket.
We spend the whole day in Dnipro, and it is much the same elsewhere. Broken windows, crumbling walls—the farther east we go, the worse things look. On our way out of the city around nightfall, we are caught in rush-hour traffic. People out on the street are just getting off work. Some are already doing the evening’s shopping or hitting the cocktail bars. As we pass a sex shop on the main drag, I hear a dull boom overhead. My phone blares. ATTENTION. AIR RAID ALERT. PROCEED TO THE NEAREST SHELTER. But there is nowhere to go. The cars are gridlocked. And anyway, the people outside appear unconcerned. They sit right on, sipping their drinks and chatting as the evening redness deepens to purple, to black.
When we return to the hotel, late at night, my Shahed still reeks of gas. I regret bringing it along with me. It is an ugly, unholy object—and I worry that it will get me in trouble at the border. I try washing the scrap in my bathroom sink, try soaking it in a mixture of shampoo and instant coffee. To no effect. It still smells like a charnel house. In the end I settle for wrapping it tightly in two plastic grocery bags, as if it were a dirty diaper. I stow it away in my suitcase and forget about it.
I don’t remember the Shahed again until I am on board the sleeper train from Kiev to the Polish border. On the Ukrainian side of the Bug River, two armed border guards with a bomb-sniffing German shepherd process my passport. They ask all the usual questions and receive all the usual answers. Just as they are about to leave, one of the guards pauses.
“And do you have any munitions? Battle souvenirs?”
I gulp.
“Munitions? No.”
The dog strains toward my suitcase. But the border guards, satisfied with my mental reservation, yank at its collar and move on. They have bigger problems to deal with.
The Shahed now sits on my desk at home. Every so often, I examine it with a mixture of revulsion and fascination.
The most memorable thing I saw in Ukraine was nowhere near a battlefield. In Kiev’s central terminal, I walked through an exhibition highlighting the country’s cultural and technological achievements. One display featured a wall-sized holographic video of quadcopters laden with bombs, rising from the earth and flying toward the viewer. A young boy, no older than three, watched in rapt silence. When the drones zoomed in his direction, he jumped up and down, excitedly tugging at his mother’s sleeve, pointing, laughing, exclaiming—“Mama! Mama! Mama!”
I can’t shake the thought that this is the only world he knows. It is the only one he will ever know.
Kiev—Here, it is impossible to evade the drones. Reminders of their presence are everywhere. Ads posted deep in the underground metro stations depict quadcopters whirring above the heads of faceless soldiers. A slogan proclaims: “The drones always come first.” A billboard in the Maidan, the city’s central square, shows a young man stroking a drone as if it were a golden retriever. It exhorts the potential recruit: “Become a drone operator today.” Signs posted at gas stations glorify the work of drone units. Disposable coffee cups feature drone cartoons. Men keep drone parts on their desks. Women wear drone hardware as jewelry. Children play at drones in school and on the street. Drones, drones, drones—they’re all anyone can think about.
With good reason, too. When night falls, the drones come out to play. Not the Ukrainian ones, of course. Those are at the front lines. The city is instead swarmed by Shaheds, kamikaze drones designed in Iran, sent in waves almost every day from Russian territory. Since 2022, when the war began in earnest, thousands of Shaheds loaded with explosives have crash-landed into the buildings and streets of the Ukrainian capital. Frequent drone attacks—as well as ballistic missile strikes—have left Kiev’s already grim skyline pockmarked with ruin. The city is also subject to rolling blackouts, the result of Russian hits on power plants, gas refineries, other critical infrastructure. Everyone who can afford one runs a backup generator; those who cannot, burn candles at night. The majority of air raid alerts are announced via app: A smartphone is critical for survival. If you miss a notification, you may get caught in a firestorm.
During the first days of the war, most Kievans were scared out of their wits. Russian tanks from Belarus rolled into the suburbs and, for a few weeks, held the city under siege. But that’s ancient history. These days the tanks lie rusting on the side of the highway, and nobody is cowering in his apartment. Of course the danger hasn’t passed. The drones buzz in at odd hours, blow windows out of buildings, torch cars in the street. But at this point the city’s residents hardly notice. They are desensitized to the threat of death from above, and, anyway, life goes on. Kiev has in fact acquired a certain joie de vivre. It was a party town before the war; it is a party town now. And, as the fighting enters its fourth year, the whole city is reeling with a giddy unease, the delirium of someone who has hung out for too long by the gallows.
Almost as soon as I arrive, I catch the city’s fever. Along with a group of other American journalists, I resolve to stay out drinking all night, or at least until the police enforce the city’s 12:00 A.M. curfew. This is not a difficult thing to do. There are plenty of bars in the city, some of which play fast and loose with the rules. The first one we visit, The Cinematographer’s Party, seems promising. It is a dingy place in a dingy part of town. On one side of the street is a deteriorating Baroque Revival apartment complex; on the other is an equally decayed Brutalist behemoth. By the time we get there, the evening’s revelries are well underway. Outside, people are smoking. Some appear to be teenagers. Under the lintel of an adjoining building’s entrance, two young women are kissing passionately, pawing at each other for warmth underneath their open parkas.
Inside, the bar is covered in garish décor. On the walls hang nude sketches that appear to have been drawn by a palsied follower of Modigliani. On the tables, lace doilies and electric candles. The staff members are all wearing leopard print vests. Tonight’s poison is rail drinks. That has never been my style, so I order a glass of Fernet-Branca, which earns me a polite scowl from my bartender and raised eyebrows from the other patrons. I quickly learn that almost everyone in here is also an American—the guy slugging rum and Coke next to me confesses that he is from Omaha, Nebraska—and that most of the Ukrainians have taken their drinks outside for a smoke break. With apologies to my countrymen, I join them.
Although I gave up cigarettes two years ago, I cannot refuse Iryna, a woman about my age, when she offers me a Sobranie. She has an affected elegance about her, with her long coat and leather gloves, and I soon understand why. Before the war, she worked in cultural development; now she is involved in the humanitarian effort. Her current job is important, she concedes, but it is not as enjoyable as the one before. She sighs. Maybe it is just a case of burnout.
“Anyway, I don’t go to the bomb shelter,” she says.
Why not? She has her reasons. She dislikes her neighbors; she hates getting up in the middle of the night; she thinks fleeing to the basement is a bother. So, when there is an air raid, she sleeps in the hallway of her apartment. Many other Kievans do the same, and an informal rule of air raid etiquette has been developed in the past few years. Two walls—that’s enough to protect you from the blast of a Shahed. Obviously, if your air raid app tells you that ballistic missiles are headed your way, that’s a different story: Run for cover as fast as you can.
A little after 11:00 P.M., the bartenders announce last call. A few minutes later, to show that they are serious, they lock the front doors. We still have almost an hour to kill before the city shuts down. Iryna suggests an Irish pub that stays open right until midnight.
“But it is a shitty bar,” she cautions.
So, after a short cab ride, we find ourselves in another dimly lit room. We’ve traded bottom-shelf cocktails for Guinness. Rugby is playing on the television. A group of young men hoot at the spectacle.
“Do you really call this a shitty bar?” I ask.
“In Kiev, we have very high standards,” she deadpans. “I only go here when I really need to get alcohol in me. Speaking of—another drink?”
I demur and make my exit. By the time I arrive back at the hotel, the police have set up checkpoints along the main roads. It is midnight.
Five minutes later, the power cuts. Then my phone blares. ATTENTION. AIR RAID ALERT. PROCEED TO THE NEAREST SHELTER. Hotel guests emerge into the lobby, bleary-eyed and bewildered. Some, annoyed, go back to sleep in their rooms. Others, more cautious, carry their blankets and phone chargers down to the basement. It is going to be a long night. For many, there are longer still ahead.
Such a scene would have been unthinkable a few years ago. But that was before the drones. Everyone knows that because of them, warfare will never be the same. But few acknowledge that civilian life is also irrevocably changed. When the war ends, the drones will still be here. And their lessons, learned over the skies of Kiev, in the disputed regions of eastern Ukraine, in Russia itself, will not be unlearned; they will be exported—they already have been exported—and reduplicated everywhere else. “A world in which people can be routinely and anonymously targeted by unseen enemies is not pleasant to contemplate,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in 2012. And it is even less pleasant to observe. We reshaped our world around the Bomb after World War II. Now we are remaking it again, in the image of the drone.
Drones are not really a new technology. Unmanned aerial vehicles have been used in warfare since the middle of the nineteenth century. Drones, properly speaking, were first deployed during the Vietnam War, when the United States used them in reconnaissance missions. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union employed them pretty much in the same way. Both sides felt a need to spy on the other, but neither wanted an embarrassing repeat of the 1960 U-2 incident. Better to lose a flying camera than a human pilot over enemy territory.
The first use of a drone as a weapon occurred in November 2002, when the C.I.A. ordered a “targeted killing” of a prominent member of al-Qaeda who was traveling with five compatriots in a convoy through the Yemeni countryside. An American operator on the ground in Djibouti launched a Predator U.A.V. armed with Hellfire missiles. When the terrorist’s truck was in its sights, the operator released a missile; it struck the truck; everyone inside exploded.
After this strike, there was significant debate among military officials over the moral implications of such targeted killings. The C.I.A. claimed that it had only authorized the mission because it had been informed that no one except for members of al-Qaeda were in the truck. But what if its information had been wrong? What if someone else had been on board: a woman, a child? Would the C.I.A. still have ordered the hit? And, if it would have, was it willing to accept the consequences: that a brutal, impersonal form of warfare, previously considered off limits, was now fair game?
The answer to that final question turned out to be yes. In the following decade, the U.S. military developed a series of elaborate and expensive programs that to this day conduct hundreds of drone strikes every year. By 2009, there were more than five thousand American drones in the air, and they took part in virtually every military operation. The commander-in-chief, wary of what he euphemistically called “boots on the ground,” preferred this hands-off approach to killing America’s enemies. It was so much easier, cleaner. Instead of constantly sending special-ops teams into hostile territory, he could safely order a few joystick junkies to strafe unsuspecting combatants—and sometimes civilians too—from a comfortable command center in the American Southwest.
Other nations raced to catch up. China, India, Israel, Britain, and the Euro states all developed their own programs and hardware. Their products are not as sophisticated as the hyper-precise Predator and its smaller cousin, the Reaper, but they are no less deadly. And, as many quickly discovered, in most cases sophistication is not necessary. In 2021, one of Iran’s flagship defense contractors, Shahed Aviation Industries, created the Shahed 136, which is basically a low-rent cruise missile. Russia bought them by the pallet. Once its military began regularly bombarding Ukraine with Shaheds, it set up its own factory for copying the drone. (The United States recently announced progress toward its own clone of the Shahed.)
Around the same time, Turkey, which is the world’s leading exporter of military drones, increased production of its Bayraktar TB2, a cut-rate version of the Reaper. On the eve of the war with Russia, the Turks sold about twenty Bayraktars to Ukraine. They were a viral success. Gone were the days of hand-wringing over targeted killings: This was a cultural sensation. Bayraktars featured prominently in government propaganda; they were the subject of a patriotic pop song; and, for a brief moment, “Bayraktar” was a popular pet name.
But as the war drags on, enthusiasm for high-tech drones has cooled. Both Russia and Ukraine discovered that while these devices are effective in long-range situations, on the battlefield there are much simpler ways to bloody your enemy. All you really need is a little bomb attached to a cheap quadcopter. So, for nearly four years now, the two armies have been flinging explosive scraps of metal at each other, across battle lines that have not meaningfully shifted. Russia has the advantage of more manpower and readier access to military resources. Ukraine is nimbler and innovates faster. Neither side is truly winning; there is no end in sight. The battle lines are not even lines, properly speaking, but rather a ten-mile-wide “kill zone” patrolled by drones on the ground and in the air. There, human beings cannot hope to survive.
It is with the kill zone in mind that I visit Killhouse Academy, the Ukrainian army’s premier school for drone operators. It is run by the Third Assault Brigade, the Ukrainian equivalent of Delta Force, in a blacked-out warehouse in one of Kiev’s industrial districts. The school offers a one-week basic piloting course (with an extra week of training for the exceptionally gifted), and it is so popular with soldiers that there is an eight-month waiting list for admissions. It is also fairly secretive: Only after my group of journalists has traveled around Kiev and its environs for a few days do its commanders consent to a tour.
It is easy to see why the brigade hesitated to open its doors to a bunch of journalists. Most military outfits, not wanting to be perceived as bloodthirsty, describe their actions in the noble language of defense. But there is no moral preening here. Soldiers sign up because they want to kill, and Third Assault is happy to teach them. Killhouse has been the subject of fervid attention from both the U.S. and European militaries, which have sent representatives to study its curricula. The hope is that soon Western military academies will adopt its methods.
When we enter the facility, brigade representatives insist that we refrain from taking any pictures of the exercises. Too bad: The place is abuzz with action. Trainees inside the warehouse are fixing up what looks like a very violent Mars rover. The screech of power drills and dance music is deafening. Outside, it is no less noisy. Quadcopters zoom through the air as students guide them toward their target: a hard hat perched on top of a long stick, attached to a remote-controlled truck driving through the tall grass—a simulation of a Russian grunt stalking through a wheat field. The sun is going down, and the land is bathed in pale red light. Were it not for the trainees’ battle fatigues, they could easily be mistaken for sportsmen loading up one last round of clay pigeons before the day’s end.
The actual killhouse is around the corner. It is an indoors obstacle course whose layout is reminiscent of the in-game world of Tron, complete with glowing discs hanging from the ceiling and cybernetic designs stenciled on the walls. Its purpose is to teach drone operators how to navigate their craft successfully through the kill zone and deliver a payload that causes maximum damage to Russian forces. This is no easy task, explains D.C., the instructor on duty. Most guys who pass through his course have never touched a drone before, and, if they have, they don’t know how to use it in a military context.
“There is a difference between freestyle race flying in civilian life and flying like a battle pilot,” he explains. “You have to be able to see through jamming and interference. And you have to understand how to move as slowly as humanly possible, but still outrun your target.”
That does sound difficult, but newbies get a lot of help from more experienced hands. Drone units are usually grouped in fours: a pilot, a wingman, an antenna operator, and an extra man, usually the newest recruit, who fills in for the others when they need him. On the Russian side, it is much the same. In fact, D.C. says, almost everything on the Russian side is organized the same way, down to the training that its pilots receive and the basic hardware they operate. He points to the wall, where a collection of quadcopters are hanging like butterflies pinned to a board. Some of those are Russian models. It makes no difference.
“It’s a completely modular system,” he says. “We just swap and change parts until the drone disappears completely.”
Because of the similarities in design, Russian and Ukrainian troops on the front lines are quite literally tethered to their drones. The quadcopter is an open-source technology, meaning that its blueprints are freely available online, and for that reason it is very easy to jam the signal between joystick and drone. To get around the problem, drone units tie their crafts to the control box with fiber-optic cables. While this solution solves one difficulty, it creates a whole set of new ones. Cables can snag on a tree, disconnect in bad weather, or provide bad signals. But the biggest problem by far is that their limited length leaves drone crews constantly within range of enemy fire.
Pilots must be skilled to survive under these conditions. In D.C.’s experience, the most successful drone operators are rarely just the smartest guys. They have something more than intelligence. They are the ones who give themselves over entirely to the craft, who log thousands and thousands of hours in the field, who, in defiance of the laws of math and physics, become one with their drone. They don’t need to make a calculation to hit a target. They just know when to press the button. This is a job that only a human being can really do well. D.C. is skeptical of artificial intelligence, and, he adds, as long as human beings are killing other human beings, he doesn’t foresee a rise of the machines in warfare.
“I’m a pilot,” he laughs. “I’m egotistical—I want to stay a pilot.”
Across town, in another blacked-out warehouse in another one of Kiev’s industrial districts, Artem Zakharov, an I.T. worker turned defense contractor, is perfecting a product that he thinks could put drone pilots out of business. When we visit his workshop, Zakharov is also cagey about pictures and videos. Not that he is overly secretive. He just knows that if his product falls into the wrong hands it could get him in serious trouble.
Zakharov tells us that he wants to make drones “as smart as possible,” so user-friendly that even an imbecile could score a hit. He says he’s created an unjammable software that when paired with the right hardware is basically unbeatable at short ranges. As he explains the complexities of his invention and how he made it with off-the-shelf components, his phone begins blasting the opening riff of “2 Minutes to Midnight.”
He apologizes—“I appreciate Iron Maiden”—and silences his ringtone.
One of the benefits of unjammable software is that it dispenses with the need for fiber-optic cables. That means that drone units can complete their missions farther away from the kill zone. And it gets better than that, Zakharov says. He has also developed a form of “last-mile guidance”—not quite A.I.—that allows operators to lock in on their targets from a distance, push a button, and let the computer do the rest of work.
“You drink your coffee, or your energy drink, or whatever,” he says. “You point and click—and boom! You don’t even have to use sticks.”
He shows us a reel of videos to demonstrate. They depict drones armed with his software entering close range on multiple Russian targets. Boom, boom, boom—all direct hits. In one of the videos, the drone operator’s face is visible as he zeroes in on a moving truck. He gives over control to the computer. The bomb explodes; the target is in flames; the pilot cheers.
Obviously, Zakharov warns, there are some ethical concerns if this form of drone warfare is widely adopted. An operator clicking a button and then watching the screen is already passive enough. It would not be difficult to automate the process entirely.
“From the technical point of view, that can be done relatively fast,” Zakharov says. “It’s just the question of if we want to go there, because when you open that door, there’s no going back.”
Privately, Zakharov frets about the possibilities of automated combat. He likes to think of himself as a civilized person in a civilized world where he will be held accountable for his actions. And he is hung up on the Geneva Conventions, which state that a decision to attack an enemy must be made by an individual willing to accept responsibility for his orders. How much can his company automate without crossing that line? He doesn’t know, and it worries him: “We don’t want to go to jail after the victory.”
Zakharov acknowledges that not everyone is as scrupulous as he is. He knows of six competitors racing to beat him on this same product. And he is certain that if the Ukrainians are moving toward automated drones, then the Russians are working in that direction too. Plus, there’s outside interest. Zakharov claims that he has a tempting offer from a household-name defense contractor. “A nine-zero investment proposal,” he says. “This is what I have on my table.”
Before we go, Zakharov invites us to the gas station across the street to examine one of his other projects. This one he is happy for us to photograph. When he picked it up on Amazon, it was a toy torpedo. But after tinkering with it in his workshop, he has refashioned it into a counter-Shahed, his own foray into drone-on-drone warfare—and his best attempt to stop the nightly raids on Kiev. He is so proud of it. He beams and holds it up like he has just caught a giant fish. Behind him, a group of women drinking coffee by the gas pumps titter into their sleeves.
The day after we meet with Zakharov, we drive to Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, about seven hours east of Kiev. It is near contested territory, only two and half hours from the front lines, and consequently receives more intense dronings than the capital. The morning we arrive had been particularly bad. More than thirty Shaheds slammed into the city before sunrise, damaging public offices, private businesses, the train station. The local studio of Ukraine’s national broadcasting station was destroyed.
By the time we reach the scene, the building is still smoldering, giving off the stench of gas and burnt rubber. Shaheds fired at close range are often filled with a heavier payload, and this explosion had clearly been a powerful one. Several neighboring apartment buildings are now windowless, and some cars on the street are covered in debris. Firemen are pouring water on the embers. The police have taped off the street to discourage curious gawkers from picking through the wreckage.
I ignore the tape and duck behind the studio. Everything is chaos. The newly homeless are piling up their belongings on the sidewalk: microwaves, sound systems, ancient television sets. An N.G.O. worker is doling out boxes labeled USAID from the back of a van. “The last from the State Department,” he jokes. Someone has leaned a cello against a tree. A man passing by pauses in front of the instrument and flashes the peace sign as he takes a selfie.
In the studio’s parking lot, I meet a local reporter who is filming the damage with a broadcast camera. He motions to me and points at a blackened T.V. truck.
“Here,” he says, indicating the mess of broken wires, converters, headsets, and servers spilling out of its back. “Equipment.”
“There,” he continues, tracing his finger from the truck to a separate pile of debris splayed out about twenty feet away. “Shahed.”
We stare in silence at the twisted scraps of metal. The reporter turns and leaves. Alone, I crouch down and pick up a piece of the fuselage the size of a paperweight. It is oily and smells like a gun range. I stuff it deep in my coat pocket.
We spend the whole day in Dnipro, and it is much the same elsewhere. Broken windows, crumbling walls—the farther east we go, the worse things look. On our way out of the city around nightfall, we are caught in rush-hour traffic. People out on the street are just getting off work. Some are already doing the evening’s shopping or hitting the cocktail bars. As we pass a sex shop on the main drag, I hear a dull boom overhead. My phone blares. ATTENTION. AIR RAID ALERT. PROCEED TO THE NEAREST SHELTER. But there is nowhere to go. The cars are gridlocked. And anyway, the people outside appear unconcerned. They sit right on, sipping their drinks and chatting as the evening redness deepens to purple, to black.
When we return to the hotel, late at night, my Shahed still reeks of gas. I regret bringing it along with me. It is an ugly, unholy object—and I worry that it will get me in trouble at the border. I try washing the scrap in my bathroom sink, try soaking it in a mixture of shampoo and instant coffee. To no effect. It still smells like a charnel house. In the end I settle for wrapping it tightly in two plastic grocery bags, as if it were a dirty diaper. I stow it away in my suitcase and forget about it.
I don’t remember the Shahed again until I am on board the sleeper train from Kiev to the Polish border. On the Ukrainian side of the Bug River, two armed border guards with a bomb-sniffing German shepherd process my passport. They ask all the usual questions and receive all the usual answers. Just as they are about to leave, one of the guards pauses.
“And do you have any munitions? Battle souvenirs?”
I gulp.
“Munitions? No.”
The dog strains toward my suitcase. But the border guards, satisfied with my mental reservation, yank at its collar and move on. They have bigger problems to deal with.
The Shahed now sits on my desk at home. Every so often, I examine it with a mixture of revulsion and fascination.
The most memorable thing I saw in Ukraine was nowhere near a battlefield. In Kiev’s central terminal, I walked through an exhibition highlighting the country’s cultural and technological achievements. One display featured a wall-sized holographic video of quadcopters laden with bombs, rising from the earth and flying toward the viewer. A young boy, no older than three, watched in rapt silence. When the drones zoomed in his direction, he jumped up and down, excitedly tugging at his mother’s sleeve, pointing, laughing, exclaiming—“Mama! Mama! Mama!”
I can’t shake the thought that this is the only world he knows. It is the only one he will ever know.
