Following up on my previous post where I delivered a Toyota Hilux to Kramatorsk, Ukraine, here's my report on the two nights I spent there (previously posted as an article on twitter):

After delivering the Toyota Hilux truck I stayed in Kramatorsk for another two nights to see how the situation has changed since my previous trip. And changed it has: as you will see, Russia is radically ramping up its efforts to destroy the Kramatorsk-Sloviansk area and force the civilian population out. It's a significantly more dangerous place to be than even a month ago.

But first things first: I still hadn't found them the Starlink they wanted. So we tracked down a store that had a single Starlink mini in stock at one of the main shopping areas:

21,900 UAH. A bit of a premium over the typical cost in Ukraine... But I mean, look at that building. About half of those missing windows are new, since the last time I had visited just a month prior, due yet another glide bomb (KAB) attack by Russia that landed on the road just ~15m away.

The unit needed the Starlink right away, so we got some fuel for my friend's perfectly normal, civilian car, at a perfectly normal, civilian, gas station:

Yes, it's open. Note the guy refilling his LPG car from the LPG tank hidden in the bunker; the one out in the open is definitely empty. Gas stations have been a priority target for Russia, as fuel distribution is critical to the civilian population; that gas station had been hit before.

I didn't get footage of us actually delivering the Starlink, as we took it to a sensitive location kinda close to the front lines. Close enough that my friend was teaching me the basics of defensive driving within fiber drone range: how to check corners for ambush drones while turning corners. Pretty simple concept: driver checks his side for drones; passenger simultaneously checks the other side. If you actually see a drone, one option is to jump out of the vehicle and hope that the goes for the high value vehicle rather than you. That's why they didn't care that the driver side seatbelt in the Toyota Hilux was broken...

With the Starlink delivered, I got to tag along with a medical officer in the unit while he checked in with some foreign volunteers from the USA who were taking time off in Kramatorsk to recover; we literally met them in a coffee shop. Concussions from near-miss encounters with drones are a serious issue. And as you can see by their patches, they took the issue very seriously:

But seriously, all joking aside, the Ukrainian military medical system is using the latest, most advanced, concussion protocols available to treat soldiers, informed by the US's experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

...and after that, I went to yet another coffee shop to hang out with my friend Sarah, and other less terminally online soldier friends of ours:

Something I want to stress here is how important it is to the soldiers that ordinary businesses like coffee shops and restaurants are still operating in Kramatorsk. When you're coming off long hours or even days in windowless bunkers, being able to go to somewhere normal and just... be normal is really important.

But that's changing. After coffee, Sarah and I went for a quick drive around Kramatorsk:

See the barbed wire and drone netting covering the road? That's all new. While the barbed wire is just precautionary - that video was taken roughly 15km from Russian lines, and there's no way Russians are getting anywhere near it any time soon - the drone netting over the road has quickly become very relevant.

Both nights I stayed at an ordinary civilian apartment rented by some soldiers on the east side of Kramatorsk; I slept in my sleeping bag on a foam mat in the living room. That night you could periodically hear Russian fiber optic drones flying by us, often followed by gunshots as soldiers tried to shot them down. Or explosions if they hit something. And again, when we woke up in the morning Russia was still attacking our area with drones.

Here's a video from that morning. I can't show you the location (we were visiting somewhere kinda sensitive). But the audio is unmodified other than having the volume boosted:

They're a bit difficult to hear. But if you listen carefully you can hear the whine of the drones. I couldn't figure out where they actually were. I did see a drone in the distance at one point, a black spec identifiable as a drone rather than a bird by the fact that it was flying in a perfectly straight line. But it was too far to be one of the drones I was hearing; I decided not to stick my head out the window for a better look.

It's a very real threat. Remember the video above of freshly installed barbed wire, and the vehicle hit by an FPV? Later that day we went by the area again and found a newly wrecked civilian vehicle that had been hit by an FPV drone, and then crashed into the barbed wire:

Once the active attack subsided, Sarah got a request to get some critical supplies for a group of soldiers located south of Kramatorsk, who were heading even further south to the front lines. In particular, baby wipes, anti-fungal cream, and waterless showers (basically a fancy wet wipe IIUC):

Laugh all you want. But hygiene is critical; every soldier I meet who has actually been in the field absolute loves wet wipes. Heck, with one of the trucks I've delivered, we included about $300 worth of them.

That also mean another trip to the hot(er) towns south of Kramatorsk, along with all the weirdness on the roads:

The Lada was pretty funny. But I also want to point out the taxi: there's still Uber-like taxi service available to some pretty dangerous locations in the Kramatorsk area. I also want to point out the weather: rain. While drones can fly in the rain, the rain causes problems like obscuring the cameras. So bad weather is a lot safer.

We got lunch at a nice restaurant in a basement:

Funny enough, there's quite a lot of lovely restaurants in basements in Kramatorsk... Anyway, during lunch Russia did yet another glide bomb attack, cutting power to the city for a few hours. Which was annoying as we needed to get a new laptop for a soldier I know who urgently needed a replacement:

In the end we decided on a 2021 Macbook Pro 16" + 1TB SSD (for backups). $1200 USD total, which I paid from the $LADA funds. Part of that soldier's job is intelligence imagery analysis; while they didn't have a programming background, they had been experimenting with AI to help them automate the process.

In general, laptops are something the entire Ukrainian military is short of; I need to do a $LADA donation drive to get donations of old laptops to soldiers.

Finally, Sarah and I picked up a soldier who was leaving the unit; he had some final paperwork and other tasks to finish before getting on the bus to Kyiv. Most of the foreign volunteers I've met have come from western countries, especially the US and UK. This guy was unusual though, as he had been born in Africa, and later got residency in the EU. He'd struggled early on due to his poor English. But turned into a good soldier. Unfortunately he needed to leave Ukraine at his six months mark to keep his EU residency valid. But his plan was to re-enlist in a different unit he'd found with foreigners who spoke his native language.

Again, that night I stayed at the soldiers' apartment. And again, we fell asleep with the sounds of occasional gunfire and drones. That morning - my last day - I wanted to get an actual sample of Russian fiber. Since essentially all the FPV drone attacks on Kramatorsk are via fiber drones, we figured we should be able to find some on the road where the two cars had been recently hit. There was a bit of a valley with bare fields that we figured the drones were probably flying through. And I knew that at the intersection of the main road and the dirt road crossing it, there was a big gap in the drone netting:

Sure enough, fiber! Some small pieces which I quickly collected... but while I was getting it I heard (and then saw) a drone a few hundred meters east. The moment Sarah noticed me looking up he immediately yelled to get in the car - he's got enough real world experiment to know why I was looking up - and we got the fuck out of there before we got spotted.

Turned out we didn't even need to go to the valley: we stopped about 500 meters away at a convenience store to get some coffee, Sarah suitably equipped in case he spotted another drone:

...and I noticed that fiber was literally on top of the store, and all over the drone netting. So I grabbed some:

Notice how Sarah motions for me to cross the street? This is important, and it illustrates the huge difference in experience between him and me. Sarah's a bad-ass soldier who has had multiple close encounters with FPV drones, nearly killing him multiple times. He's a soldier thinking about the tactical situation; I'm a guy in a tracksuit.

We talked about it after, and Sarah explained that he didn't like how open that side of the road was. We knew fiber drones were in the area: I'd just seen one a few minutes ago, maybe a kilometer away. If one did attack us, we'd be much better off on the other side of the road, where there were multiple options for cover. Similarly, when we'd stopped the car in the valley, while I was just thinking about the fiber he was already thinking about how to respond to a drone attack: dive into the bushes by the road, and hope the drone attacked the higher value vehicle rather than us.

I also want to talk about how this changes the psychology of the situation for the civilians in the area. In my previous trip, before Russia started pouring resources into attacking Kramatorsk with fiber drones, while Kramatorsk was still a relatively dangerous place, your main threat was glide bombs and cluster bombs. Those weapons are relatively random, and aside from just hiding in bunkers all day (air raids can easily last 12 hours in Kramatorsk), there's not that much you can do. If your time is up, it's up. Which makes the danger easier to just ignore and get on with your life.

FPV drones on the other hand are active weapons: there is a Russian soldier on the other end potentially looking right at you via the camera. That Russian may very well decide to kill you. Yet, with the right response, you can stay alive and turn an attack into a near miss, or at least a non-fatal injury. But that means constantly thinking about the threat. Something no civilian should have to do.

In any case, with my fiber collected (and one quick trip to Nova Poshta to get an envelope to put it in), I got on my bus and left Kramatorsk. For now.

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