'We feel joy we killed our enemy'

The drone operators trying to hold the frontline

- Dan Sabbagh East of Zaporizhzhia

In a warm bunker, lined with wooden logs, it is Dmytro's job to monitor and help drone crews on the frontline.

Perhaps a dozen video feeds come through to his screen on an increasingly hot section of the front, running roughly from Pokrovske to Huliaipole, 50 miles east of the city of Zaporizhzhia.

Dmytro, 33, is with the 423rd drone battalion, a specialist unit formed last year. He cycles through the feeds, on Ukraine's battlefield Delta system, expanding each in turn. The grainy images come from one-way FPV (first-person view) drones; clearer footage, with heights and speed, is from commercial Mavic drones; and at one point there are images from a bomber drone, with its available munitions marked in green.

It is a common sight across Ukraine's front, though Dmytro and his commander, Kostya, a captain, point out that the terrain below is distinctive. This is not the more defendable Donetsk, with its towns and slag heaps. It is flat, farming land punctuated by destroyed villages, the meeting point of the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

While Vladimir Putin's most recently stated goal is to take all of Donetsk, by diplomacy or force, it is near here that the line yielded in November. The geography makes it tricky to defend, Kostya observes: “There are a lot of fields and if we lose a height advantage, we have to retreat for kilometres.”

An opportunistic Russian attack east of Huliaipole caught the Ukrainian defenders short. The area had been held since 2022 by a war-weary 102nd territorial defence brigade, soldiers from Ivano-Frankivsk in the west, but they could not withstand the sudden pressure. About 6 miles of territory was lost.