The soldiers drove up to an abandoned holiday home, somewhere along the Oskil River in northeast Ukraine in late February. The night was clear and still — a sharp contrast to the daylight hours filled with the near-constant boom of artillery fire.
The only interruption to the darkness was the flash of a Russian airstrike somewhere in the near distance, painting the horizon with a flood of orange light for a brief second.
The slow whir of a descending drone overhead broke the silence. “Is that one of ours?” one of the soldiers asked another. The reply: “I sure hope so.”
As Ukraine
