Clad in khaki fatigues, the Ukrainian volunteers lounged on a concrete terrace as dusk swallowed the surrounding fields. Music trickled from a phone, mingling with bursts of laughter — a fleeting ease before what they had been warned would be a “hot night.”
They were members of one of many civilian units guarding the skies around the capital, Kyiv, on a recent Saturday night, their job to shoot down incoming Russian drones using old machine guns supplied by the Ukrainian Army. As they do every night, the volunteers — university professors, builders, salesmen — stood ready at their base in Pereiaslav, a town 50 miles southeast of Kyiv, waiting for the signal to deploy.
At 11:35 p.m., Mykhailo’s phone rang. He picked it up, then shouted, “Let’s go!”
The chase was on.
Mykhailo and the other two members of his crew jumped into a gray pickup parked at the foot of the terrace and sped off, racing through narrow roads into the countryside. They pulled up beside an open field a few minutes later and jumped out. Moving quickly, they set up three tripods — two for machine guns, the third for night-vision binoculars and a laser.
Then, Mykhailo — who, like other crew members in this article, asked to be identified by only his first name for security reasons, according to military protocol — glanced at a tablet set on the pickup’s hood. Its screen lit up with a swarm of red triangles sweeping across a live map of Ukraine; they showed Russian attack drones, several dozen miles away.
“Three heading our way,” said Mykhailo, who is a trade union representative by day. “Let’s wait.”
While Russia intensifies its drone assaults on Ukraine, volunteer crews like the one in Pereiaslav are spending sleepless nights trying to repel them. As the crew deployed last Saturday, Russia launched a record-breaking 472 drones and decoys at Ukraine. This Friday, Russia sent off another swarm of more than than 400 drones and decoys, in addition to nearly 40 cruise missiles and six ballistic missiles at towns and cities across the country, according to the Ukrainian Air Force, in one of the largest barrages of the war.
Military analysts say Russia uses drone swarms to wear down Ukraine’s air defenses before unleashing missiles that are far harder to intercept.
Russia has also improved its tactics. Its drones now often fly high, out of reach of machine guns, before swooping on their targets at full speed. The drones constantly change route and include many decoys to confuse Ukrainian forces.
To shoot down drones and missiles, Ukraine relies on a sprawling network of units armed with everything from antiquated machine guns to cutting-edge Western air-defense systems. It also uses electronic jamming to scramble navigation systems.
Kyiv, a frequent target of Russian air attacks, has held strong thanks in part to crews manning powerful U.S.-made Patriot air-defense systems that can intercept guided missiles.
But the city’s reliance on unpaid, lightly equipped volunteer crews to shoot down drones shows just how stretched its air defenses are.
The unit in Pereiaslav, a quiet town of 20,000 on the Dnipro River, was formed in summer 2023. Sofia, a former journalist now working full time with the air-defense crew, said locals noticed Russian drones skimming low along the river to evade radar.
“We saw them, heard them, and understood we needed to do something,” Sofia said. “All we needed was guns and ammo.”
They pulled together a team of civilian volunteers, including women, and contacted the Ukrainian Army. The military sent them some old guns and provided basic training. Everything else — uniforms, bulletproof vests, first-aid kits, fuel, food — is at the volunteers’ expense.
For the past two years, they have juggled day jobs with grueling 12-hour night shifts chasing drones. Caffeine, they say, has become their most reliable ally.
Oleh Voroshylovskyi, the commander of the unit, explained that Kyiv’s air defense was structured in three concentric rings. His unit covers about 20 miles of the outermost layer, tasked with taking down incoming drones early and warning the rings closer to the capital what’s heading their way.
For nearly two years, the unit has relied on World War II-era Maxim machine guns and several Uk vz. 59 machine guns, developed by Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, to bring down drones.
“They may be old, but they’re effective,” said Mr. Voroshylovskyi, showing off the weapons at their base, a large building where downed Russian drones were displayed only a few feet from a relic of Ukraine’s Soviet past — a large white bust of Lenin, now turned to face the corner.
The Maxim, Mr. Voroshylovskyi noted, was once used to down small planes. “How is a drone different from one of those planes?” he said.
After knocking down about 30 drones, the crew recently received a new, more powerful machine gun, an American-designed Browning, mounted on a pickup. Crew members plan to use it once their training is complete.
“We had been dreaming of it,” said Sofia, watching as the team tested the gun on Saturday.
For now, however, Mykhailo’s crew has to make do with the old guns.
After mounting them on the tripods during Saturday’s night attack, the team waited in the silence of a pitch-black night, lit only by a crescent moon and a scatter of stars. The stillness was occasionally broken by the croak of toads and the hoot of owls.
Then, suddenly, the tak-tak-tak of machine guns echoed from the north. “Look! It’s getting busy over there,” Mykhailo said, pointing to red tracers cutting through the night, accompanied by spotlights sweeping the sky. Later, the whir of rotor blades hummed overhead — Ukrainian helicopters were chasing the drones.
“They’re not leaving us anything,” Mykhailo joked.
After about an hour of waiting, a familiar sound from the north made the crew freeze. It was a grinding buzz like a lawn mower, signifying a Russian attack drone. Their radar did not show it, but the sound left no doubt.
“It’s coming!” shouted Yaroslav, one of the crew members.
They scrambled into position behind the mounted guns. Yaroslav rotated the night binoculars, which fed a grainy black-and-white image of the sky onto a small connected screen. The buzz grew louder, then curved west, circling around them. Unable to spot the drone, the crew held its fire, unwilling to waste precious rounds.
“Russian drones used to fly at about a thousand meters — that we could hit easily,” Yaroslav said. “Now they’re often flying at 2,000 meters. Our weapons can’t reach that.”
The crew relayed the drone’s approach to other units closer to Kyiv and stayed alert. Yaroslav, an I.T. professor who had served on an exam jury just hours earlier, said their role often involved observing more than shooting, and coordinating with nearby teams. He added that the job had also grown riskier, with Russian drones increasingly targeting the units tasked with taking them down.
As the night wore on, the crew members settled into a familiar rhythm of scanning their tablet to track swarms advancing through a radius of about 120 miles, moving into position at the first buzz and watching as the sky lit up with red tracers.
By the time dawn broke shortly before 5 a.m., they had not fired a shot. But the damage from dozens of drones that had slipped through was already clear on the social media feeds they had been scanning — explosions in Kyiv, buildings ablaze across the country, wounded civilians rushed to hospitals.
“A classic night,” said Yaroslav, his eyes red with sleeplessness.
Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting.
Constant Méheut reports on the war in Ukraine, including battlefield developments, attacks on civilian centers and how the war is affecting its people.
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