The cold, metallic hum of the Shahed drones was a sound Pavlo had come to dread more than any human scream. It was a sound devoid of humanity, a chilling prelude to destruction. For years, he had been trained to fight a flesh-and-blood enemy. “Kill the enemy,” his instructors had drilled into him, “but do not hate them.” The logic was brutal, yet undeniably sound: hate clouded judgment. It led to rash decisions, to emotional rather than tactical responses. The enemy, they’d explained, was just another man, caught in the same brutal dance of war, likely sharing the same cold rations and the same fear of death. In a strange, twisted way, the enemy was your closest confidant in that shared hell.
But there was no such kinship with the drones.
Last night’s onslaught had been unprecedented. 367 drones and missiles, a terrifying swarm unleashed upon Kyiv and other regions. Pavlo had been on a rooftop in the capital, the night sky a canvas of explosions and the frantic streaks of anti-air fire. He’d seen the Iranian-designed Shaheds, like malevolent insects, buzzing their way toward their targets. Each one was a tiny, programmed killer, devoid of fear, devoid of conscience. There was no shared suffering with a drone, no common ground. It wasn’t living under the same conditions, putting itself in danger by order. It was just a machine, following lines of code.
As the morning light revealed the devastation – at least 12 dead, dozens injured – Pavlo felt a new kind of weariness settle in his bones. This wasn’t the fatigue of a fierce firefight, where you could respect the skill of an adversary, even in defeat. This was the exhaustion of fighting an unseen, unfeeling force. Yuriy Ihnat, the Air Force spokesperson, had called it “the most massive strike in terms of the number of air attack weapons on the territory of Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022.” Pavlo didn’t need the numbers; he’d lived it.
He thought of the missile fragments he’d seen this morning, twisted shards of metal that held no story, no human footprint. In the old wars, soldiers carried the weight of the lives they took, the faces of their adversaries, however briefly glimpsed. But how do you reconcile with a machine? How do you forgive a line of code? The battlefield was changing, and with it, the very nature of conflict. The enemy was no longer a person to be understood, however distantly. It was an algorithm, and in its cold, precise destruction, Pavlo realized, lay a terror far greater than any human hatred.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
Russia hits Ukraine with the largest drone-and-missile attack of the war so far
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