Published on November 25, 2024 at 06:52. / Modified on November 25, 2024 at 09:00.
A fan purring, almost a whirring sound, announces its blind presence. The noise is enough to cause anxiety. A vague shape stands out against the dark blue sky and its ruby eye, which shines in the night, traces disturbing zigzags. The witch is out: the haunting of Russian fighters. She will fly from building to building all night long, spreading death and destruction. This Ukrainian drone that the Russians call the Witch is actually a large FPV drone, which can drop up to four bombs and then return to its base. The night is his kingdom, he reigns supreme there, death is his signature. In eastern Ukraine, to the south and east of Pokrovsk, on both sides of the front line, the towns and villages are nothing more than piles of ruins where only houses remain. walls partly collapsed. In this cauldron, enemy combatants are only a few dozen meters apart, sometimes less. In a control post at the rear, Roman, commander of a drone unit, Aigle by his nom de guerre, a small, agile man, has connected the screens which will show the images filmed by the drones and is preparing.
Russian forces are pushing everything they can into this region of Donbass, south and east of Pokrovsk. They do not advance quickly, but continuously and their pace tends to accelerate. Although they fought in numerical inferiority, the Ukrainian defenders succeeded at the cost of colossal efforts and incredible determination to slow down their enemies. The massive use of drones has made tanks and other armored vehicles very vulnerable. The Russians therefore favored infantry assaults, even if it meant sacrificing thousands of men to gain a few hundred meters. “On the 10 kilometers of the Selidove front,” explains Roman, “100 Russian soldiers die every day. But they still send some back, mainly Storm-Z, former prisoners used as cannon fodder, but also seasoned men.
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