DISPATCH | WAR IN UKRAINE
Ukraine’s Drone Mother unleashes her deadly weapons into battle
Maria Berlinska’s organisation has trained 50,000 drone pilots for the Ukrainian army
The Times
There was a time when Maria Berlinska was simply Masha, a Kyiv university student studying for a master’s degree in Jewish history. Today she is known across Ukraine by a different name: the Drone Mother.
Since 2014, when she dropped out to enlist with the Ukrainian army fighting in Donbas, she has sought to impress upon the country’s leaders the importance of nascent drone technology in the fight against Russia. For a long time the message fell on deaf ears, but Kyiv has begun to grasp it as both sides enter an arms race for a technology that could shape 21st-century warfare.
“From the first trips I made to the front in September 2014 I realised that drones were the future,” said Berlinska, 35, who
