One evening in late March, Liudmyla Zarutska, a vigorous woman of 80 years, left work and headed to her apartment on the left bank of the Dnipro River in Kyiv, Ukraine. A member of the cleaning staff at the city’s Palace of Children and Youth, Zarutska planned to retire on April 1. Winter’s chill was easing. She had just completed her final Saturday shift and looked forward to life as a pensioner, timed to begin in the warming weather of spring.
Upon reaching the nine-story residential building where she lived for decades, she rode the elevator to the top floor, unlocked the steel door to her three-bedroom apartment and entered a space that smelled delightfully of coffee. Comfortably at home, Zarutska, who went by Liuda, settled in to watch the news, as Ukrainians anxious about the war with Russia often do. Talk at the time orbited around the possibility of a cease-fire brokered by the American president, Donald Trump. Ukrainians were skeptical. While Washington pressed unfavorable terms on Ukraine, Russia ordered more troop assaults along the front and intensified attacks from afar on Ukrainian cities. Air-raid alarms wailed almost every night across much of the country, followed by the engine noise of long-range drones, a sound resembling dirt bikes passing overhead. Sunrises illuminated fresh destruction, wounding or death.
After watching the news, Liuda spoke with her son, Mykola, by telephone. He lived near the front in Sumy, hours away by car. But the weather was tolerable, and Mykola hadn’t seen her in almost a week. He offered to visit that night. Liuda would not have it. She reminded him that he was starting a new job in Kyiv on Monday and would then spend weeknights at her apartment. They would share much time together, she said, very soon. It was his last conversation with his mother. Her insistence almost certainly saved his life.
Liuda had long been lucky. Born in 1944, months after the Red Army drove Hitler’s Wehrmacht from Kyiv, she survived threadbare years of reconstruction to live a good life. In the 1960s, when a new housing complex opened in an agricultural field on the left bank, she promptly moved in. It was a prime apartment with a view to Pechersk Lavra, the serenely beautiful monastery on the opposite bank’s green slopes. The city built a kindergarten below her kitchen window and other schools nearby, allowing Liuda to raise her son in a pleasant neighborhood outside the capital’s center.
Mykola became a standout basketball guard, then a junior military officer and finally a manager in the agricultural sector of independent Ukraine. Liuda doted on him throughout — cooking hearty solyanka and borscht, baking black-currant pies and putting her vintage Singer sewing machine through its paces. Decorated with colorful filigree, the machine was a utilitarian heirloom. Liuda’s father returned with it from Germany after World War II to present to her mother, who passed it to her. In the waning years of the Soviet Union, when fabric was more readily available than fashionable attire, Liuda labored at it to make clothing for her son. She also embroidered pillows, including one with a geometric cross-stitch pattern for Mykola that she kept in the living room. According to Ukrainian tradition, the pattern protected him from harm.
No one knows what Liuda did in the hours after the phone call. Maybe she listened to music. She enjoyed Eric Clapton and Sting, tastes developed in the 1980s when Mykola, stationed in East Germany, brought home a tape deck and cassettes smuggled across the Iron Curtain. Maybe she brewed coffee. When the Soviet Union dissolved, one newfound pleasure was access to quality beans, which Liuda rarely went without. However she passed the time, Mykola suspects she ultimately nodded off on the living-room couch or in her bedroom a few paces away. Either location would explain how she survived the initial impact on her apartment’s roof, minutes after midnight, of a Geran-2 drone.
Geran is one of Russia’s names for its domestically produced line of Shaheds — long-range attack drones of Iranian design. In current form they measure about 11 feet long, weigh more than 400 pounds and dive almost invisibly through night skies in carbon-fiber hulls tinted black. In tiresome Orwellian fashion, “geran” is also Russian for geranium, and the geranium that slammed onto the reinforced concrete ceiling of Liuda’s apartment carried a fragmenting high-explosive warhead enhanced with small tungsten-alloy balls and an incendiary metallic fill.
The momentum behind the strike combined with the warhead’s explosion to breach a five-foot-wide hole into Mykola’s childhood bedroom and blast the metal spheres across the space. Tungsten alloys, which are extremely dense, also possess a hardness approaching that of diamonds, making for a particularly penetrative form of shrapnel, capable of passing easily through light armor, flesh and bone. None hit Liuda. The room’s concrete walls absorbed the metal. But this weapon’s creators had conceived of multiple ways to kill. Aerosolized by detonation, the drone’s complementary payload of metallic microparticles and flammable oxidizer — titanium, zirconium and barium chlorate — ignited in a fireball that whooshed out from the room, down the corridor and around corners, setting furniture and cherished things ablaze.
Liuda survived that too. But flames blocked the way to the exit, forcing her to shelter in her bedroom, separated from the burning corridor by a wooden door. Air rushed through blown-out windows, fanning an inferno. Her refuge became a concrete oven. Time was short, options few. Other than a leap to the playground nine stories down, there was no immediate way out.
News of drone impacts travels fast. As flames poured from windows, a neighbor alerted Mykola of the strike. He rang his mother three times. She did not answer. She could not. Silhouetted by a rolling orange glow, she stood at her bedroom window, screaming as she burned.
This year, simultaneous to President Trump’s calls for peace, Russia sharply escalated its strikes on Ukrainian cities. Relying principally on copies of one-way Iranian drones, the same type that Iran fired across the Middle East into Israel this month, the attacks overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses to wound or kill civilians almost every night. The weapons cost little, fly far and have made bedtime in Ukraine a time of dread.
Iran first provided its drones to the Kremlin in 2022. That fall, Russia launched an average of 34 Shaheds into Ukraine per week, according to Ukrainian Air Force data analyzed by the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Some attacks targeted military positions. Others hit power plants or Ukraine’s electrical grid, subjecting parts of the population to lightless nights as winter gripped the steppe. The following year, when Russia began manufacturing Shaheds, the pace rose to 67 a week. It climbed gradually from there until midsummer and fall 2024, when it veered upward, to 227, including decoys. Since then the attacks have multiplied almost fivefold, to an average of 1,048 launches a week in the six weeks that followed Trump’s push for a cease-fire in mid-February. On June 8, Russia fired 479 long-range drones in a single night. “There has not been a single, uninterrupted three-day period without Shahed launches this year,” said Yasir Atalan, a data fellow at the center. “Civilians have faced or heard Shaheds almost every night.”
Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and its occupation of roughly one-fifth of the country, led to a hard pivot by both sides to drone warfare. Remarkably precise, relatively inexpensive and operated by crews far from view, remotely operated drones have joined, and even displaced, longstanding conventional weapons as primary means of waging war. Rapidly evolving tactics and tools have turned Ukraine and parts of Russia and the Black Sea into live-fire test ranges for prototype tech and previously unseen killing routines. By late 2023, drones had reordered the soldier’s experience of frontline war. With Shaheds, they have come for civilians too.
As attacks have intensified, some Shaheds hit military targets. But night after night, Shaheds slam into buildings of no discernible military value, like Liuda’s, prompting Ukraine to call Russia’s campaign a deliberate breach of the laws of armed conflict. “The use of Shahed drones by Russia violates the ‘principle of distinction’ between military and civilian objects,” said Andrii Haychenko, Ukraine’s deputy minister of justice, citing Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions. The scope and systemic execution, he argued, constitute a sustained terror campaign against noncombatants and meet the legal standard of crimes against humanity. The Russian Foreign Ministry did not reply to a question about this accusation.
In its common form, a Russian-made Shahed looks like something between a flying black triangle and enormous lawn dart. The odd profile comes from a delta-wing configuration built around a central fuselage that extends forward in a rounded nose. The nose contains the warhead. The tail, roughly flush with the wing flaps, holds a four-cylinder engine that spins a wooden propeller for thrust. (A two-cycle mix of high-octane gasoline and oil powers the engine; a blend similar to weed-whacker fuel.) The hull is made of plastic, and because thin plastic can be flimsy, often the skin is sandwiched around a honeycombed cardboard stiffener.
Such is the basic layout. But a combat drone must navigate and attack, which requires capacities to turn, dive, receive and perhaps transmit digital and radio signals. So between a Shahed’s nose and tail are components enabling precise maneuverability — antennas, electric servo motors, a modem, circuit boards and more. Many are foreign made. In this way Iran and Russia have developed a poor man’s cruise missile, a drone born of engineering informed by open-market scrounging.
The result can seem unimpressive. To gain flight at all, a Shahed requires an assist from a catapult or a small booster rocket that blasts it off a rack then falls away as the drone lumbers on toward its distant destination at top speed of about 115 miles per hour. This is startlingly slow. (Russia’s Iskander-M ballistic missile, which it has also fired into Ukraine, flies faster than Mach 6.) When Kyiv is the target, a Shahed will be vulnerable to being shot down throughout its puttering, multihour journey across Ukraine’s airspace — hardly the stuff of defense-expo brochures.
Technical comparisons can mislead. Viewed through other lenses, and with humanitarian concerns set aside, the Shahed is the rational creation of its global context. Iran and Russia have been under international sanctions for years. If necessity breeds invention, when pariah states engage in arms production, necessity also breeds cost containment, reverse engineering and circumvention of trade barriers. Shaheds emerged from these processes to give the Kremlin a small-dollar tool for projecting power and inflicting pain.
Assembled in a modern industrial complex in Tatarstan, about 550 miles east of Moscow, and at a former cement plant in Izhevsk, an arms-production city in the Urals where Russia has manufactured firearms since czarist times, the drones fly into Ukraine carrying off-the-shelf Western and Chinese components and domestically produced warheads more powerful than those in the Iranian original. They are a physical manifestation of Russia’s sanctions-evading skills, its industries’ dogged adaptability and the value of the Kremlin’s sustaining partnerships with autocratic bedfellows in Tehran and Beijing — factors that cohered in an unorthodox class of weapon, built on the cheap.
Russia produces Shaheds in wartime secrecy, leaving its expenditure per drone difficult for outsiders to establish. But with credible estimates of production costs currently ranging from $50,000 to $80,000 each, Shaheds arrive above cities as lethal counterpoints to big-ticket weapon systems in many military arsenals. An Iskander-M costs at least $2 million, and the longer ranging Kh-101 cruise missile runs substantially more. The disparity is immense, and manufacturing costs offer only a partial view of a weapon’s full expense. Russia’s ballistic and cruise missiles often launch from warships, fighter jets or strategic bombers, which are complex systems that cost state coffers tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each, take years to manufacture and require highly trained crews. Shaheds are different. The racks often used to fire them could be fabricated by a moderately skilled welder. And they cost less than the antiaircraft missiles that stop them — an exchange that plays to Russia’s favor every night. For the Kremlin, pressured by international sanctions and vulnerable to dips in commodity prices, the drones suggest a national arms-design epiphany: Just as you don’t need a Lamborghini to deliver pizza, if you want to darken lights or terrify civilians, a plastic Shahed will do.
With Russian Shahed production firmly established, nights in Ukraine are heavy with fear. Mornings for many are bleary with a numbing exhaustion that anxious insomniacs know, particularly in cities like Kharkiv, right beside Russia and frequently hit.
The dangers extend past those brought by Shaheds. Russia often launches long-range drones and long-range missiles in tandem, stretching air defenses. Ballistic and cruise missiles, with their more powerful warheads, were behind recent agonizing attacks against civilians, including a strike in Sumy on Palm Sunday that killed at least 35 people, and another in April in Kryvyi Rih, home city of Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, that killed 21 people, nine of them children. In May, after barrages with 298 drones and 69 missiles lit Kyiv’s skyline with explosions and fire, Trump rebuked his counterpart in the Kremlin. “He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” he wrote on social media, of Vladimir V. Putin. Notwithstanding that attack, in the last five months drone attacks deep into Ukraine outnumbered missile attacks by a ratio of about 24 to 1, according to Atalan, of the Futures Lab. The ratio is rising.
Analysts suspect that Russia fires long-range drones in quantities roughly in concert with the rate its industry manufactures them. With launches now exceeding 4,000 a month, when fighting ends, any manufacturing capacity at this level would allow the Kremlin to stockpile tens of thousands of Shaheds a year. With ranges in excess of 1,000 miles, the drones could reach from Russia’s borders not just to the Baltic capitals of Riga, Vilnius and Tallinn, but also to Brussels, Berlin and Paris. With lighter warheads, they could fly beyond. Earlier this month Zelensky declared that Ukrainian intelligence had discovered that Russia was sharing Shahed-manufacturing knowledge with North Korea. If so, that could one day mean further stockpiling of a weapon that until a few years ago was barely known to exist. “This must be addressed now,” Zelensky said, “not when thousands of upgraded Shahed drones and ballistic missiles begin to threaten Seoul and Tokyo.”
In a written answers to questions about the Shahed program, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs appeared to dismiss Zelensky’s allegation about transferring Shahed technology to North Korea. “The mildest form of commentary on such statements by the Nazi Kyiv regime is ‘highly unlikely,’” the reply read. (The ministry did not answer several other questions.) It then linked to a 2020 tweet by Trump in which he called The New York Times “an embarrassment to journalism.”
For Russia, the Shahed program marks an extraordinary return on diplomatic and industrial investments and a partial rebound from stinging military and intelligence setbacks. After expecting to roll triumphantly across Ukraine in 2022, its ground forces have been plodding performers, suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties and requiring reinforcements and munitions from North Korea. To replenish ranks, the government recruits from prisons and pretrial detention centers, diverting convicts and the accused to war. Prey to anti-ship missiles and naval drones, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet no longer patrols much of the Black Sea, where its flagship vessel, after absorbing two Ukrainian missiles, rests on the bottom. Stacked with squadrons of sophisticated warplanes, its air force has been unable to establish air supremacy over an adjacent nation. It also suffered consequential damage this month to as much as one-third of its strategic bombing fleet in a drone sabotage operation by the Security Service of Ukraine, or S.B.U.
The rise of Shaheds, in contrast, demonstrates martial resilience rooted in the state’s other spheres, including its sturdy manufacturing roots, which have allowed it to field a new standardized weapon fast and maintain the advantages, through money and sheer mass, that Russia holds over its smaller neighbor. Ukrainian intelligence officials say that in 2022 Iranian weapons moved to Russia on vessels crossing the Caspian Sea in so-called “dark mode,” with international maritime-tracking beacons absent or switched off, and have also accused the 223rd Flight Detachment, an air carrier affiliated with Russia’s military, of importing at least 1,500 Shaheds on transport aircraft. According to the S.B.U., Iran dispatched Brig. Gen. Sharif Molasarei Abbas Musa, of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and as many as 20 instructors, to teach Russian crews Shahed use; General Musa, it added, organized many early attacks.
After Shaheds began exploding in Ukraine, technical analysts went to work dissecting them. Whenever a Shahed landed without detonating, or wounded or killed a person in areas under government control, first responders scoured the site. Among them were investigators from intelligence services, police units and the Ministry of Justice, who collected what they could. What followed amounted to arms-refuse necropsy. Technicians studied specimens to trace sources of components and to glean information that might be incorporated into countermeasures. They determined that early variants were assembled in Iran but that their pedigree was mixed. Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, or H.U.R., found the weapons contained a hodgepodge of international parts and an Iranian warhead.
By 2023 Russia invested in domestic Shahed production in an industrial park in Tatarstan run by a company called JSC Alabuga. In mid-2023, these drones began striking Ukraine, according to examinations of downed drones by Conflict Armament Research, a private arms-investigation firm. Soon after that, Alabuga began producing decoy drones, called Gerberas, that operators launched with Shaheds to distract air defenses and consume antiaircraft ammunition. The decoys have a foam body and cost a fraction of a Shahed. In collaboration with Chinese firms, Russia also expanded the line via production of another Shahed variant by a firm called Kupol at a plant in Izhevsk. It called that model Garpiya, Russian for “harpy.”
Russia declined to discuss its collaboration with Iran or China. “We believe it is inappropriate for the Russian Foreign Ministry to comment on such questions,” the ministry said in a statement, “especially when they affect the interests of two sovereign states friendly to Russia.”
Much about Russian Shahed production appears to involve dubious practices. Media reports say that Alabuga’s labor pool includes students as young as 15 from a vocational school and that it lured young women from abroad with promises of training and employment in the hospitality industry and then assigned them to drone-manufacturing jobs. At least four women from Africa told The Associated Press that they were paid less than expected, kept under surveillance and forced to work without adequate protective clothing. To obscure the origins of certain parts, including computer chips and carburetors, someone along the drones’ supply chains often obliterates components’ serial numbers and markings, according to Damien Spleeters, an arms researcher who supervises the Shahed-examination program for Conflict Armament Research.
The behaviors of Alabuga and Kupol have landed both companies on sanctions lists, but like their Iranian partners, they have continued to produce drones loaded with international parts, including from the United States, Switzerland and Japan. (To show up at a fresh Shahed impact site in 2025 is to encounter a shattered plastic-coated wooden propeller, a bent and dented Chinese engine and bits and pieces identical to stock found in hardware stores, including fuel lines made of clear aquarium tubing and stainless-steel hose clamps.) But Russia also added design touches, resulting in more capable and powerful drones.
One change was to the hull. Iran constructed Shahed airframes in a light gray hue, inclining almost to white. Russia switched to a black model for night attacks. Composed of fiberglass and reinforced with woven carbon fibers, these newer hulls were stronger. “This material is very durable, not like the Iranian one,” said Andrii Kulchytskyi, deputy head of the Military Research Center at Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise. Other enhancements followed. By late 2023, Shaheds carried tungsten-alloy balls. Tungsten alloys are contained in munitions produced by sophisticated arms manufacturers, including a version of the American HIMARS precision-guided rocket as well as tank projectiles used by Israel and the United States. Russia found a quick means to add them to cheap drones, sometimes simply wrapping them in rubbery sheaths around the warhead. Russia has also begun to swap in domestically made Kometa satellite-navigation antennas, which resist jamming and are used in many of its other precision weapons.
By 2025, Ukrainian technicians identified at least five different warheads in Russian Shaheds, including thermobaric, incendiary and high-explosive charges in fragmenting steel cases of various weights. By this spring some were as large as 90 kilograms, almost 200 pounds. The drones’ navigation systems also underwent changes or testing. Some Shaheds have carried modems and Ukrainian SIM cards, which connect to cellular networks; recent models carried multiple cards, apparently to hop to a new phone number if a connection drops.
One theory proposes that these drones use cellular networks to navigate and share inflight position data with command centers to help Russian targeting teams evaluate which routes best evade defenses. If so, this would effectively allow drones that reach targets to show others the way. Russia also appears to salt the waves with specialized Shaheds. These include specimens with cameras, perhaps flown remotely via goggles by pilots in Russia, which Ukrainian intelligence officials presume are used for target surveillance or assessing strike damage. Research and development happen in real time. “A problem we are having with Shaheds is they are making changes faster than we can report them,” Spleeters said. “It’s hard to keep up.”
One sure way to prevent Russia from refining attack routes is to stop Shaheds long before they reach targets. To do so, Ukraine maintains layered, frequently shifting defenses. Among them are antiaircraft missile batteries, helicopters and fixed-wing planes that fly interception missions, machine-gun teams and air-defense artillery crews firing from trucks and small boats and troops with shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles, including the American-designed Stinger. Ukraine also spoofs Shaheds with transmitters feeding false GPS signals to lead them off-course, and it severs cellular service to phone numbers moving across the country on speeds and routes that only a drone could take, cutting live navigational links. Among the many innovations is a unit called Darknode, part of the Unmanned Systems Forces’ 412th Nemesis Regiment, which is armed with anti-Shahed drones. The secretive unit joined the fighting this year.
Days after Liuda died, the unit began its nightly work in the minutes before darkness, when four Ukrainian soldiers in a vehicle eased to a stop on a dirt road between soggy fields. Ukraine’s expansive tracts of sunflower and wheat can feel oceanic, and these fields, set back from the border with Russia, formed a flat plain of budding vegetation punctuated by occasional windbreaks of trees. The soldiers stepped out into the cool air. Cows mooed in the distance. The sweet odor of manure floated by. One soldier knelt to the dark soil, tore up a tuft of grass and dropped a few blades, observing which way they drifted on the breeze. Wind direction would influence launch.
Working quickly, the soldiers lifted green crates from their vehicle and opened them, revealing their weapons. The drones, whose name and technical specifications remain classified, were prototypes of a once futuristic concept now in regular service in Ukraine — drone-on-drone aerial warfare. After assembly, each would climb high into the sky to hunt Russian drones. Conceived as an affordable means of countering Shaheds, they would be flown by Kyrylo, Darknode’s ace, who was recruited into his unusual role after his mastery of video games, including Grand Theft Auto, translated smoothly into flying drones.
The soldiers formed a squad operating under the call sign Chaika, Ukrainian for sea gull, and followed routines not seen before in war. Maksym, a sapper, and Sergeant Oleksandr, the squad leader, assembled launch equipment. Oleh, the navigator, set up antennas on tripods.
Next the squad armed the drones and proceeded with operational checks. While Maksym clutched the drone so it would not leap forward, the motor emitted a screaming whir — a telltale audio signature of this war. Satisfied, Kyrylo switched off the drone. Darkness settled over the fields. From the nearest village, a dog barked nonstop.
A computer monitor illuminated the soldiers’ faces and displayed a national radar feed. It showed that the sky was free of incoming drones. Kyrylo knew it was early. The squad’s enemies were beyond the horizon, across the border, most likely loading Shaheds and Gerberas onto racks. The soldiers talked softly, waiting for drones they expected soon. The pattern was well known. Russia usually launched Shaheds after dark in sequenced barrages from several different directions.
The attack that killed Liuda was typical. Multiple Russian units, each regarded as elite, operate Shaheds. That evening, over about two hours, three units launched drones inside Russia targeting Kyiv, according to the H.U.R. Shortly before 6 p.m., the 45th Separate Special Purpose Brigade sent the first wave from Bryansk. Thirty-five minutes later the 1st Reconnaissance-Strike UAV Squadron of Grom-Kaskad, a Russian drone brigade, fired a barrage from Millerovo, a base in the Rostov region. (Grom-Kaskad includes sons of wealthy Russians and Russian politicians, and operates far back from front lines.) A little after 7:30 p.m., a group from the 924th State Center for Unmanned Aviation, which is central to Russia’s Shahed program, launched a salvo from Kursk. Ukraine’s air force said Russia also flew drones that night from Primorsko-Akhtarsk, which is across the Sea of Azov, and from Prymorsk, a Ukrainian city under Russian occupation.
The barrages included 147 drones, the air force said — 122 Shaheds and 25 decoys. The straight-line distances from launch to Kyiv ranged from about 250 miles to almost 500. But Shaheds and the decoys accompanying them rarely fly straight lines for long. They follow meandering flight plans that sometimes almost circle back on their routes while winding their way to programmed destinations. This is why the drones that survived Ukraine’s defenses were in the air for roughly five or six hours before one slammed onto Liuda’s home.
Ukrainian radar detects the incoming weapons, both to alert civilians and for interception. Paired with nationwide alarm systems, including air-raid sirens and free mobile-phone apps, the radar effectively warns residents of threats and helps defending soldiers choose their positions. The system has generally worked well; from 2022 until early this April, fewer than 6 percent of drones made it through, according to an analysis by Atalan. But when Shaheds fly in multiple waves and with new technology or tactical adaptations, more can reach targets. During the week Liuda died, 121 Shaheds slipped by, damaging infrastructure and wounding or killing civilians almost nightly. The trend lines are gloomy. This May, as attacks intensified, almost 20 percent of launched drones flew past defenses to land with blasts of shrapnel and flame. “The dragon,” Haychenko said, “becomes more cruel.”
Almost simultaneous to Liuda’s death, another Shahed dove from the sky over Ukraine’s capital toward Emmanuel Church Kyiv, a busy religious center on the Dnipro River’s right bank. It was 12 minutes after midnight on a Sunday during Lent, the period of spiritual reflection before Easter.
Many worshipers had spent Saturday at the church, preparing for service the next morning. Among them were Oleksandra Haranska, 26, her husband, Sasha, 35, and their 5-year-old daughter, Nicole. The family previously owned an apiary with more than 300 beehives near Orikhiv, a town in Ukraine’s southeast. In a region of sunflower fields, the bees produced an abundance of honey, with which Oleksandra opened a small confectionery baking cakes. The couple were devout. A soprano and pianist, Oleksandra sang in the choir in Emmanuel Church Orikhiv and volunteered in its youth ministry. Sasha, an assistant pastor, served as an unofficial military chaplain.
As Russian invaders advanced in 2022, rumbling across the steppe toward Orikhiv, Sasha visited Ukrainian troops at local checkpoints, offering gratitude and encouragement while sharing coffee, tea and his wife’s gingerbread, sweetened with honey jarred by his own hands. Often he invited them to join in prayer. Many were not believers. Some mocked him. Sasha, an evangelist, was undeterred. For six months, he visited bunkers, a routine he sustained into 2023, when Russian artillery moved closer. As Orikhiv shuddered under shelling, Sasha’s ministry gained acceptance. Huddled in dugouts as projectiles screamed through the air and exploded around the countryside, troops stopped teasing their persistent pastor. They accepted his blessings and asked when he might return.
When fighting reached the farmland where the beehives stood, war idled Sasha and Oleksandra’s businesses. They kept working, distributing humanitarian aid from the church. Shelling grew more intense. A frontline town was no place for Nicole, who was 3. The family relocated to Kyiv, along with Oleksandra’s younger sister, Natalya.
In the capital the family found sanctuary in Emmanuel Church Kyiv, a community of almost 1,000 people. Oleksandra joined its 50-member musical cast and baked desserts each Saturday evening ahead of Sunday service. Nicole joined Sunday school. A strong-willed girl, she resisted her parents’ urges to wear sweaters or jeans. She preferred dresses, which she complemented with a tiny toy crown. In a time of violence and dislocation, having lived under frightening blasts, Nicole approached her wardrobe as if she might control what she could. She was a bright, singular presence. People referred to her as Emmanuel Church’s own Disney princess — a small, bold child.
That Saturday evening was bonding. Nicole announced that she wanted to build a gingerbread house. “Mama, let’s make one!” she said. Her timing was good; utensils and baking supplies were spread about. Oleksandra set aside work. Mother and daughter assembled a small house, lightly coated in white frosting.
The night ran late, and at 10 p.m. they agreed to finish decorating their project the next day. Oleksandra carried Nicole to a three-room wooden building on church grounds, where volunteers working into the night often slept. She tucked in Nicole and returned to baking while Sasha watched their daughter. When she rejoined the family later, the couple lay down beside Nicole for sleep.
A short while later Oleksandra became aware that she was in circumstances she did not understand. She was walking unsteadily in her underwear in an almost lightless room. She had not seen this place before. Her hips and pelvis panged sharply, three teeth were cracked, her upper arms were cut and deeply bruised, her left hand throbbed. Skin on her back had been scraped away; blood beaded and seeped. She sensed intuitively that she was not dreaming — the pain was too real, the surroundings too tangible — but she could not recall arriving in this strange place, much less the origins of her wounds. “Maybe I have been kidnapped,” she thought, but was not sure. She had no idea of even time. Feeling cold, she dropped to the floor. Alone, enveloped in darkness, she passed out.
Minutes passed. Oleksandra woke and tried to stand. Pain forbade movement. She passed out again.
She returned to semiconsciousness as flashlights approached. A man shouted: “She’s here!” Oleksandra recognized voices: Vitaly, a pastor, and Serhii, the young man who maintained the church grounds. Words lifted confusion’s veil. A Shahed had destroyed their shelter, Vitaly said, and Sasha was dead.
With that Oleksandra Haranska re-entered the world.
The Shahed had carried a 110-pound warhead identical to the one that killed Liuda on the other side of the river. Its explosion blew asunder the room in which her family nestled, heaving Oleksandra over a now-shattered wall to the lot next door, where her impact broke teeth, cracked her pelvis and tore skin. She regained her feet, staggered to the nearest building, pushed open a door and collapsed in a storeroom. There she entered a liminal state, slipping in and out of consciousness for almost an hour. Now warm hands touched her. Serhii covered her with a blanket. She was saved. Rescuers rushed her past smoldering rubble to a hospital, where after stabilization and surgery she woke from anesthesia the next day to hear that Nicole too was dead.
In composition, Darknode is typical of Ukraine’s armed forces. After more than three years of war, the country fields the second largest military in Europe, behind only Russia’s in size. It has built this force through mass mobilization that exempts men younger than 25 from conscription, creating groups of soldiers much older than those of Western nations and lending units a seasoned character. Before Russia sent combat divisions over the border in 2022, Oleksandr, 37, was an archaeologist at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Oleh, 31, supervised shifts at a plant that manufactures Volkswagen parts; Maksym, 36, was a tailor with a side-hustle printing logos on hoodies and T-shirts. The trio joined Ukraine’s ground forces before moving to the Unmanned Systems Forces upon its formation in 2024.
They followed a commander, Second Lt. Oleksandr Yarmak, into Darknode, which Yarmak leads. Yarmak, a successful and widely followed rapper, ranks among Ukraine’s better-known performing artists. In “Babylon,” a track he released in 2024, he vented disgust over an ominous beat at Russia’s long-range drones and the soldiers deploying them. “There are those who rejoice in launching a Shahed into a child’s bedroom,” he rapped. “Half a world away from home, brutalized from birth/ Thirsty for blood, just true evil.” Bitterness flows both ways. Russians often pen messages in white ink on the coal-dark fuselages of Shaheds, including on the nose of a drone that landed in Ukraine intact. “Good morning, faggots,” it read.
As the commander of a new unit, Yarmak leads multiple squads. They are a second generation of drone operators to engage in air-to-air drone war. Pilots from the S.B.U. used first-person-view drones last year to down two Russian helicopters. Other drone teams chased and struck Russian aerial-surveillance drones and shorter-range kamikaze drones known as Lancets. Stopping Shaheds with drones was a natural next step, and Yarmak said it offered advantages over certain other methods. Chief among them: An anti-Shahed drone could trail behind its target until the safest moment to destroy it without risking collateral harm, as when a damaged Shahed, knocked off-course, falls to a village. “We can follow a Shahed until it is past a settlement,” Yarmak said, and detonate it over unpopulated fields. Moreover, the technology rapidly improves. Unlike many older weapons systems, including antiaircraft machine guns, interceptor drones are rapidly evolving. Darknode was experimenting with different models. “This is an ongoing process,” Yarmak said. “Our ultimate goal is to make these drones fully autonomous.”
Hitting Shaheds presented more challenges than hitting reconnaissance drones. Shaheds fly almost exclusively at night and much faster than the drones that Ukraine previously downed. The Unmanned Systems Forces worked with drone designers to develop miniaircraft capable of ranges extending far past the horizon, high altitudes and airspeeds faster than their quarry’s 115 miles per hour. These models cost about $6,000 each. To find pilots, Yarmak scoured the service’s training center for prospects. There he found Kyrylo, who enlisted in September 2024, just as Shahed attacks surged.
Kyrylo was a graphic designer from Donetsk who lived under Russian occupation until 2019. Before his oath, he owned a DJI Mavic, a quadcopter in widespread civilian use, and trained on digital flight apps. He joined at 29 intending to become a drone pilot. “I understood the skills I have fit perfectly into the profession,” he said. “And I understood the impact a pilot can have is pretty high.” His impact has been undeniable. In the first weeks of Darknode’s participation in the fighting, its squads shot down 22 drones; Kyrylo accounted for 12 hits.
As he waited for a fresh volley of Shaheds, a monitor showed live and archived radar feeds. Straight lines indicated paths of the day’s glide bombs — heavy air-to-ground munitions, released by Russian aircraft, that carry a strapped-on package of welded wings and a navigation system. Their glide paths clustered in dense parallel lines from inside Russia to impacts along the border between Sumy and Kursk, where Ukrainian troops were dug in. No Shaheds were visible on-screen. “It is like fishing, much depends on luck,” Oleksandr said. Some positions ended up on flight paths of more Shaheds than others, and each night might be different.
As Russia grew familiar with Ukraine’s counter-Shahed efforts, its units refined tactics. Simplistic attacks became savvy. “In the beginning they flew straight to their targets,” said Andrii Kharuk, a professor at Ukraine’s Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi National Army Academy in Lviv. “Now they are maneuvering.” The evasions include roundabout flight plans, altitude changes and attacks in sequenced waves. Shaheds also tend to fly higher now, above machine-gun range, and dive sharply in their final seconds, which reduces vulnerability to ground fire but can make them less accurate and thus less discriminate. Like the war’s drone contest writ large, the two sides constantly parried, technically and tactically. “It is like a race between armor and sword, this race between Shahed and anti-Shahed,” Oleksandr said.
The radar showed incoming drones. The attack had begun. Shahed flight paths differed from those of glide bombs. They followed circuitous routes. The squad reacted calmly. It would take many minutes for drones headed toward Chaika’s sector to fly into range, and that assumed they did not change headings first.
The monitor displayed a line indicating the interceptor drones’ range. Over several minutes, more images appeared onscreen, just beyond reach. But one was drawing closer. Oleksandr and Maksym set a drone for launch. The incoming Shahed crossed the line.
Kyrylo stood outside, controller in hand. The interceptor rushed skyward. It flew quickly away, lost to blackness, out of sight, emitting its whir.
Kyrylo scooted to a seat in the vehicle, where another monitor shared the view. The drone gained elevation, then turned toward the approaching Shahed, passing the nearest village, which Kyrylo skirted. As his drone neared its target, the Shahed vanished from radar. Kyrylo flew the interceptor along its anticipated path, but the attack drone was gone. It might have malfunctioned and crashed, as Shaheds sometimes do. Kyrylo flew the drone back toward the van and landed it on soft dirt. Maksym ventured out with a flashlight, retrieved it and cleaned it with hand wipes. “Just a little dirty,” Oleksandr said.
A second incoming drone flew within range. Again the squad prepared to launch. Just before the interceptor’s flight, heavy machine-gun fire thumped in the distance. Another unit was working. “They are shooting our Shahed,” Kyrylo said. The Russian drone disappeared from radar.
By 10 p.m. the radar screen was thick with drones. The attack became a wave. Multiple Shaheds weaved in many directions, flying deeper into Ukraine. The squad watched, wondering which would enter their sector. Two Russian drones turned their way; the first on a heading that might carry it over the squad. Chaika relaunched its interceptor, which rose to meet it. The distinctive sound of a long-range drone became audible. Through a hand-held thermal scope, Oleksandr looked skyward, scanning until he froze. “I see it,” he said.
Oleh talked Kyrylo toward the target, which had climbed as it passed through Ukraine’s airspace. The pair entered a zone of intense concentration. Kyrylo spotted something far ahead. “Oh, my God, is it him?” he said.
“Yes, probably him,” Oleh said. The Ukrainian drone flew closer. “No, it’s a bird,” Oleh said. “it’s a bird, it’s a bird. It’s birds.”
With slight thumb movements, Kyrylo manipulated the flight controller. The interceptor banked right. After more searching, a Russian drone appeared onscreen, a distant white dot. It had decelerated and almost threw off its pursuers. “He’s going very slowly,” Oleh said.
As the range narrowed, the drone grew in size onscreen. Kyrylo was ready to approach with the explosive charge. “What’s the situation with villages?” he asked. “Any villages below?”
“No villages,” Oleh said. “We can work.”
The interceptor pulled tight. The Russian drone had an angular fuselage, not the rounded body of a Shahed. It was a Gerbera, a decoy. Decoys sometimes carry explosives. Kyrylo flew closer, almost even with the Gerbera’s tail, and toggled a detonator switch.
A dim light flashed high above the field’s edge. “Got it!” Oleh said. “That’s it, target hit!”
Kyrylo smiled. Gerberas are more maneuverable and change altitude more than Shaheds, he said, making them harder to destroy. The hit was another proof of concept. But the Gerbera had done its job — drawing attention away from Shaheds.
A boom echoed over the farmland, the delayed report of the Gerbera’s end.
Maksym moved to set up the next interceptor. Yet another Russian drone rattled overhead, crossing above the huge field. More Russian drones were making their way toward cities. The fighting became an episodic mix of faint engine noise, machine-gun fire and an occasional boom. Across Ukraine, air-raid alarms sounded.
Shahed attacks continued during the following days, striking cities all around Ukraine. Many drones hit Kharkiv, a constant target, damaging a post office, a market with a food court, an office building and convenience store, and a neighborhood of small apartment buildings and single-family homes. After each impact, exhausted civilians milled around. One man in his 70s wandered in a striped bathrobe with a light beside the broken windows of his home, another near-miss survivor in the nightly death roulette. He said he only recently finished repairing his property after it was struck more than two years ago. Inside, past a kitchen cluttered with debris, paramedics worked on his wife, collapsed on their bed, in shock but alive. A next-door neighbor lay dead on the rubble of a damaged porch, covered with a golden thermal blanket.
Again Ukraine called on the United States for more sanctions against Russia. None came. Ukraine operates long-range precision drone programs of its own and flies its slow-moving explosive drones deep into Russia. These drones have targeted oil infrastructure, factories producing arms or arms components and military bases, although last December several struck apartment buildings in Tatarstan. The strikes caused no serious injuries, Russian authorities said, but in March another hit a meat warehouse in the Moscow region, reportedly killing three employees. In April and again in early June, Ukraine’s drone operators attacked the Alabuga compound in Tatarstan. Russian defenses stopped many of the weapons; the strikes caused little damage. On May 7, Ukrainian drones hit the NPO Bazalt ammunition plant outside Moscow, where Russia produces the incendiary Shahed warheads that hit Emmanuel Church Kyiv and Liuda’s apartment. The extent of damage was unclear. On June 9, similar drones hit the Russian factory that manufactures Kometa navigation antennas; the resulting fire caused the plant to suspend operations, at least temporarily, a local official said.
Ukrainian officials hinted darkly at payback by other means. In the contest for drone dominance, murder is a tactic employed by both sides. Last fall the H.U.R. informed the public of the killing near Moscow of Col. Aleksy Kolomeytsev, who, it said, as head of the 924th State Center for Unmanned Aviation organized training for Shahed operators. It circulated a photograph said to be of the colonel, mouth agape, dead in a tracksuit.
Ukraine is not alone in targeting the architects of Shahed production and use. On June 13, Israeli airstrikes killed Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, who had overseen the development of drones fired at Israel, including Shaheds; the European Union sanctioned the general in late 2022 for supervising drone transfers to Russia for “use in the war of aggression against Ukraine.”
Further operations against boldfaced names in Russia’s drone sector feel all but inevitable. The S.B.U. has published notifications on the Telegram messaging app of suspicion of involvement in criminal behavior for Timur Shagivaleev, a senior executive of the Alabuga manufacturing compound, for organizing Shahed production leading “to the death of people, including children” and for Yuriy Velikoklad, chief executive of the 223rd Flight Detachment, for transporting the drones from Iran to Russia. The Iranian brigadier general Sharif Molasarei Abbas Musa, whom the S.B.U. accused of training Russian Shahed operators and helping to organize Shahed attacks in 2022, has also been notified in absentia of its suspicions, the service said, and “comprehensive measures are being taken to find and punish all those guilty.”
Haychenko, Ukraine’s deputy minister of justice, said investigators share information with intelligence officials about “people who are responsible for committing some war crimes” and “by a miracle they disappear from this planet.” Asked if he was referring to assassinations, Haychenko smiled coldly, then offered a two-word reply. “Shit happens,” he said.
After the Shahed killed Liuda Zarutska, Mykola rushed to Kyiv. He scaled the staircase and slipped past the open door, stepping through an acrid smell onto a crunching carpet of wet ash. Before him was his former home. The loss was total. Firefighters had knocked down and doused the fire, but save for blackened pots and other metal bits, almost everything Liuda owned was destroyed. Her sewing machine, its brightly painted finish charred away, rested on a soggy mound in his childhood bedroom, beneath a gaping hole in the ceiling. Rain drizzled in. Small circular holes dotted walls, the marks of shrapnel. Pieces of black fuselage were scattered about.
Mykola was familiar with sights like these. Six months earlier a Shahed landed in the garden beside his mother-in-law’s house in Sumy. Its explosion left a large crater, broke windows, damaged the roof and showered the area with the drone’s broken pieces. He cleaned up the mess.
Now he made his way to the living room. Family photo albums, his athletic trophies, the flat-screen TV he bought and programmed to his mother’s favorite channels, the pillow she embroidered to protect him from harm — all had burned or melted into indistinguishable black heaps. Usually when Mykola visited, he slept on the living-room couch. There was no couch. Flames had consumed it, just as they might have consumed him, had his mother not urged him not to bother with the drive.
Eyes reddened, voice measured, he wondered aloud why Russia, in possession of more land than any other nation, was intent on claiming Ukraine and willing to attack apartment buildings to do so. “Still the bastards want more,” he said. A former Soviet military officer, he knew well a certain way of thinking, a blend of pride and greed, found among the masters of Ukraine’s neighbors to the east. “They envied the fact,” he said, “that we could live better than they did.”
Behind him was a small balcony. Since childhood, when Mykola left for school or trips, his mother saw him off by waving from its railing as he crossed the courtyard below. The rituals of motherhood are strong. When he visited the week before, Liuda waved from there.
Across the river, Oleksandra Haranska awaited pelvic reconstruction surgery in a hospital with her mother and sister at her side. Government investigators and an Emmanuel Church pastor, Pavlo Tupchyk, had pieced together what happened, and gently briefed her. Two Shaheds fell beside the church one minute apart. The second hit the asphalt a few yards from the room where she and her family had laid down for sleep. Its explosion cut a crater into the ground and radiated a wave of overpressure that sheared away the entire room and threw much of its contents, including three occupants, to the property next door.
The blast killed Sasha and Nicole instantly, according to an investigator for the S.B.U. Their mattress landed atop the building’s roof, 20 feet up. How the overpressure and flame and metal balls did not kill Oleksandra, no one knew. But she flew in a slightly different direction, landed alive and was propelled by adrenaline to move away from the rising fires. No matter her broken pelvis, she staggered to the building’s storeroom, where rescuers found her unconscious almost an hour later, after presuming her dead.
Her survival, she said, was a miracle creditable to the will of God. “Maybe I know something, or have something inside, that God still wants to use here on Earth,” she said. She would spend the season in physical therapy. Once she could walk again, she said, she would start a new ministry, perhaps with sports, music and art. “This,” she said, “is the path of healing.”
Oleksandra’s first operation succeeded, allowing the church to host a funeral service for Sasha and Nicole in mid-April. A church is not its buildings, and as it happened, because of the particular layout of the Emmanuel Church grounds, well-wishers gathered between the two Shahed impact sites, which the worshipers had fastidiously cleaned up. A portrait of Sasha holding Nicole stood before caskets of mismatched size. Oleskandra sat in a white robe with a bandaged left hand. She had tried to make sense of an attack on a church, but could not summon a satisfying explanation. Bereft of husband and child, learning to walk for a second time, she put conjecture aside. “I’m certain that there are questions we just will not get answers to,” she said. “Not here on Earth.”
On other matters, she chose faith as her guide, drawing from Romans 12:19. “I know one thing: Whoever did this, they touched the apple of God’s eye, and it will not go unanswered,” she said. “From my side, I forgive those who did this, even though humanly speaking it is impossible to forgive. But I know what God said: ‘Leave vengeance to Me.’”
Additional reporting by Yurii Shyvala
Read by Robert Petkoff
Narration produced by Krish Seenivasan
Engineered by Devin Murphy
The post The Weapon That Terrorizes Ukrainians by Night appeared first on New York Times.
