Inside Kyiv's unending fight against Russia's drone army

Swarms of Iranian-made Shahed UAVs target Ukraine almost every night. Sam Kiley meets some of the men using Second World War-style machine guns to shoot them out of the sky

- Sam Kiley

The crack and the ear-splitting blast – two in a row, then a third – rattle windows and set off car alarms. But, in a city under constant bombardment, a smoker in a doorway tips a little ash and takes another drag. A hotel receptionist, pooled in lamplight, doesn’t look up from her papers. The explosions, they know, come from outgoing long-range anti-aircraft missiles being fired from the centre of the Ukrainian capital against incoming attacks.

While the citizens of Kyiv won’t move for these, the sound of lawnmower engines in the sky will prompt an immediate race to cellars and shelters. For swarms of Iranian-made Russian Shahed unmanned drones are fired at Ukraine almost every night. They’re about two metres across, delta winged, and carry between 30kg and 50kg of explosive. They are guided by a primitive GPS system and driven by whining two-stroke engines.

“We’re pretty accurate, especially when they’re flying low at about 200 metres above us,” says “Lucky”, the gunner in a small unit that forms part of Ukraine’s air defence.

He is part of a team that, like soldiers across the country, have shrugged off US president Donald Trump’s latest edict, which has halted the provision of foreign aid to almost anywhere. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has insisted that the aid freeze doesn’t include military help. But only Egypt and Israel have been excluded from the ban, and there has been no signal from the Trump administration that Ukraine will still get the assistance it desperately needs.