In a narrow apartment in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, Pavlo, a 30 -year -old drone operator who had just returned from the front, opens a black suitcase of the size of a pizza box. Inside there is a four -rotor drone that sought to fly through the room.
He pressed buttons in the control unit and moved the antenna to different positions. Nothing happened. “Sorry, not today,” he said with a smile. The unit seemed good to be, but something was broken.
On the front, Pavlo, who asked to be identified only by his first name, was drones pilot with remote vision (First Person View o FPV in English). That is, models of remote control drones by means of a remote video camera and a screen or video glasses.
These small drones, highly maneuverable, have front cameras that allow them to fly at a distance. For approximately the last year, the FPV loaded with bombs have become omnipresent on the Front in Ukraine, replacing the heavy weapons that characterized the first phase of the war.
FPV pursue armored vehicles, hunt infantry units through trees lines and stalk individual soldiers to death. “You can't hide from the FPV, and running is useless,” said Pavlo. “Try to calm everything you can and pray.”
Even when a FPV flies too high to see it clearly, or is hidden behind foliage, soldiers can hear their distinctive and sharp buzz.
“BZZZZZZZZZ!” Says Pavlo. “They are hunting you.”
Image source, Getty Images
After more than a year on the front, Pavlo has returned to his apartment in Kyiv that he shares with his wife. But the sound of drones pursues it.
Everyday mechanical tools such as grass cutters, motorcycles and air conditioners remind him of drones that persecute his unity companions.
And nature does not use to relax either. Pavlo can no longer hear the buzzing of bees and flies near him without feeling growing panic. “I don't like to go out to nature and listen to this sound, because it reminds me a lot of drones,” he said.
The trauma associated with sound is not new: generations of soldiers have been affected by sudden noises after returning to civil life. But as the war in Ukraine has become a conflict driven by drone technology, trauma has evolved with it.
“During the last year, most patients, if they do not have physical injuries, suffer from mental injuries as a result of drone activity,” said SERHII Andriichenko, head of the Kyiv Military Hospital. “We call this Dronefobia“.
Constant tension
Thousands of men return from the front as Pavlo, with acute stress disorders associated with the sounds of the drones, Andriichenko explained. The Dronefobia It can be triggered by a variety of common urban sounds: small motorcycles and scooters, cutcases, air conditioners, anything mechanical that buzzes.
“If it is a cyclomotor or a corteped, the first thing I think could be a drone,” said Savur, another soldier who returned to the front and lost an arm in a FPV drones attack.
On the front, the drones were a “permanent noise,” said Savur, who, according to the military protocol, asked to be identified by combat name. “The sound of a hard projectile only a few seconds, but the sound of the drone is there most of the time,” he recalled.
“You can stay in your position, in your trench, and listen to it for hours. I remember that sound all the time,” he added.
Or sometimes the problem was the opposite: silence.
“Silence is always the beginning,” Andriichenko said. “When soldiers enter rotation in combat stalls, they begin to listen carefully to make sure there are no drones. There is constant tension, constant fear. They are always looking up.”
In many cases, this constant feeling of tension has not dissipated with the return to civil life. Soldiers have been observed suddenly extinguish the lights of their houses, get away from the windows and hide under the furniture.
Subsequently, if a soldier receives treatment, Andriichenko describes how he often does not remember any activation sound, but his wife or family will mention as triggers light an air extractor or air conditioning.
The soldiers of the early stages of the war, which were more characterized by brutal and direct combat, returned home in fear of being in the forests, where much of the fighting had been fought.
But the war with drones has reversed the phenomenon. Now the soldiers “feel safer in the forests, under the dense drinks of the trees,” said the psychiatrist.
Whistleblower
The increase in the use of drones has had another terrifying effect for combat troops: it has expanded the danger zone beyond the front line. Soldiers operating at a distance of up to 40 km, or that are removed after intense rotation, can no longer lower their guard.
Nazar Bokhii, commander of a small drone unit, was one day about 5 km from the contact line in a shelter when his unit directly hit a Russian mortar position at 22 km. Encouraged by success, Bokhii left the shelter at full speed, forgetting the usual protocol of stopping first to listen to a buzzing buzz.
A few meters away, a Russian FPV floated in the air. While heading at full speed, Bokhii only had time to raise his arms. When detonating, he ripped both hands and the left eye, and caused serious burns to the face.
Bokhii's post -traumatic stress disorder was limited, according to him, to an occasional response to motorcycles and grass cutters. But he knew the effect of sound, he explained, because his unit had used him to infuse terror in others.
“We were the side that generated fear with the sound, not the one who suffered it,” said Bokhii.
At some point they realized that the sound could be used to force Russian soldiers to enter vulnerable areas. “If you fly around, it becomes a proof of the enemy's psychological resilience,” Bokhii said. “The sound of the drone itself is a serious psychological attack.”
According to Bokhii, if you fly over a soldier for a long time, he will leave a safe shelter and simply run to open ground. “Our psychology works in such a way that we need to do something to calm us down,” said Bokhii.
“So you approach and attack it psychologically … and start running and gets easier to reach.”
A daily terror
And the psychological terror of the FPV is no longer just a problem in the front. It has come beyond the areas behind the front lines. Russia has begun to use FPV drones to launch ammunition on civilians in nearby Ukrainian cities.
Among the most affected is Jersón, a city in the south occupied for a time by the Russian forces and that is still within the reach of the drones. According to Human Rights Watch, Russian forces have deliberately attacked civilians in the city with FPV drones, killing them or mutilating them, which constitutes a war crime.
According to regional military administration, at least 84 civilians have died in the Jersón region as a result of Russian drones attacks so far this year.
Residents say that the tiny FPVs are a daily terror.
“There is no safe place,” said Dmytro Olifirenko, a 23 -year -old border guard who lives in the city of Jersón. “You always have to be alert, concentrated, and therefore, the body is constantly under stress,” he added.
Image source, Stanislav Ostrous/BBC
Olifirenko was waiting at a bus stop in September when he heard the family sound of a Russian drone flying. “We thought I would follow the bus, because they had been looking for civil buses,” he said.
Instead, the drone simply dropped his ammunition at the stop, causing the shrapnel to crash against the head, face and leg of Olifirenko. The video of the incident, filmed by a passer -by, captured the drone's buzz followed by Olifirenko's screams as he bleeding on the sidewalk.
Olifirenko now hears the drones “constantly,” he said, are there or not. “It seriously affects mental and psychological health,” he said. “Even when one goes to Mykolaiv or another city, you hear them constantly.”
For civilians such as Oliferenko, drones have transformed the daily sounds of a populated area (cars, motorcycles, generators, corteys, airs) into a psychological challenge that they must face daily, even while facing the real danger of the drones themselves.
For soldiers who return from the front, such as Pavlo, drones have created a new and specific type of fear, one that is not easy to overcome.
“You see the world as a battlefield,” said Pavlo. “It can become a battlefield at any time.”
And of all the triggers, the ear, the human sense that drones exploit with such effectiveness, was the most insidious.
“When you see something, your brain can analyze it in a second, you can realize what it is. But an unknown sound is different. Your brain has changed. You cannot ignore it, you must answer. Because in the front line, it could save your life.”
*Svitlana Libet collaborated with this report. Photographs of Joel Gunter.
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