In 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.”
For the past year Shyshak’s brigade, the 241st, has scoured the heavens for Russian flying objects. Its task is to shoot them down before they can reach the capital. He and his territorial defence colleagues are based about 100km east of Kyiv, along one of several drone flight paths. “I like my job. We are pretty successful. We stop death here. Our families are in Kyiv so we are protecting our wives and children,” he said.
