48 hours with a Ukrainian spy drone team — Kyiv’s eyes in sky learn to live without pity
A publicly funded drone is having a huge impact on the morale of a population hungry for retribution, says Anthony Loyd in Ukraine
Under the soft light of early morning, serenaded by birdsong and the rumble of distant artillery, the drone pilot began the day’s work of killing and destroying.
Seated beneath a canopy of trees and camouflage netting, sunbeams dappling his desk, Loki took a puff from his vape and leant towards the screen of a laptop, staring at images relayed from his Shark drone that is cruising over the front.
Russian trenches, designed to maximise interlocking fields of fire, appeared in sawtooth patterns on the screen. In some sections of the front the vista of flat fields and box-shaped woods was pitted, scorched brown and smouldering from shellfire. Elsewhere, fields blushed with poppies.
• Russian mutiny latest: plane ‘linked to Putin’ vanishes from radar
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-coup-yevgeny-prigozhin-putin-wagner-moscow-latest-news-m83ht2zlr • Is
