n a small wood in the Kyiv region Anatoliy Shyshak stared at the night sky. Dusk was falling. The only sounds came from a thrush nightingale and a faraway yapping dog. Shyshak – a sergeant in Ukraine’s territorial army – was listening for something else: an enemy drone. “It sounds like a moped. Not a classy Italian one, but something cheap and horrible,” he said. “They fly between 100 and 300 metres above the ground. You hear a rattling.”, has scoured the heavens for Russian flying objects.
In the meantime, Shyshak’s unit hunts slower-flying drones using ancient military equipment that could have come from a museum.Yevhen Dolin showed off his machine gun: an M2 Browning, designed during the first world war. “It might be old but it works,” he said. The gun was mounted on the back of a pickup truck. There was no point in wasting a $4m Patriot missile on a $20,000 drone, he explained, observing: “It’s basic economics. You don’t use a big gun to shoot a sparrow.
Unit members sleep in an underground dugout. Its roof is made from cross-hatched logs. Were it not for the war, the view would be idyllic: fields and dappled groves, bathed by a coral-pink sunset. With Russian troops advancing in the east, seizing a string of villages near the, could Ukraine still win? “It’s a difficult question. We need more air defence systems. For now we have to ration our bullets. A lot depends on our western partners,” Zhygun said.