With drones overhead and mines underfoot, Times journalists are granted rare access to the embattled city of Druzhkivka — the new heart of Ukraine’s defence of the east
Anthony Loyd and Jack Hill
August 28, 2026
The Times
Fortune and speed favour the brave on the five miles of the H-20 highway between Kramatorsk and Druzhkivka, where the wrecks of burnt-out cars, shredded netting and the remains of drones lie scattered across the tarmac. Max was fast. He was lucky too.
Driving his vehicle at full throttle, the Ukrainian soldier narrowly beat a Russian first person view (FPV) drone pursuing him from behind; it smashed into the anti-drone netting and exploded with a distinctive thump. “FPV!” Max yelled, slaloming the vehicle through the blackened wreckage of more than 30 less fortunate vehicles, some still smouldering. He jammed on the brakes, dropped off three Ukrainian soldiers on the northern outskirts of Druzhkivka, then sped away.
As the soldiers took in their surroundings, the vista offered scant comfort. Drones whined across a cloudless blue sky. The smoking wrecks of two more Ukrainian military vehicles sat on one side of the Kryvyi Torets river. On the further bank, across a small bridge ravaged by shellfire and drone strikes, lay the remains of a dead Ukrainian soldier.
Crossing the bridge, another Russian drone scythed into view. A hidden soldier emerged from bushes and blasted away at the drone with his AK-47. The drone tumbled and exploded at the bridgehead. “Keep going,” warned the soldier. “Don’t wait around here.” “That’s four I’ve shot down today,” he added, staring skyward, gun in hand. In this way the patrol began.
The grinding battle for Donbas remains the epicentre of the war in Ukraine. Yet the plethora of drones and their vastly increased range have widened the “kill zone”, making much of the eastern region almost inaccessible to journalists.
This summer other events have diverted attention from the war in the east: Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian infrastructure, the escalation in Russia’s ballistic missile attacks in response, and Ukraine’s internal political upheavals.
Yet the fate of this 30-mile arc of territory, commonly known as “fortress Donbas”, linking four Ukrainian cities from north to south — Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka — is of grave importance to both Russia and Ukraine. As a result, the area is exposed to more fighting than anywhere else on the front.
Running along the H-20 road and supported by satellite settlements, rivers, industrial areas and high ground, the area represents Ukraine’s strongest eastern defensive line. Its loss to Russia would mark a mortal blow to Ukraine’s future ability to defend itself. Conversely, without its capture, Putin will be unable to declare even a token victory.
With much of Kostyantynivka now overwhelmed by Russian forces after months of bitter fighting, Druzhkivka is shaping up to be the next major battleground in this theatre of war. As gateway to Kramatorsk, Ukraine’s most important military and logistical hub in the Donbas, Druzhkivka’s loss would have terrible consequences for Ukraine’s continuing presence in the region.
In the past six weeks, Russian forces have intensified their bombardment of the city, and multiplied their drone campaign to cut the Ukrainian logistics lines essential for Druzhkivka’s defence.
Last week The Times was given rare permission to join Captain Iryna Rybakova, press officer for the 93rd “Kholodnyi Yar” Brigade, for a “thunder run” down the H-20 highway, followed by a seven-mile foot patrol with her and two riflemen around the city.
Pushing southwards towards the city centre, robots were everywhere and people were scarce: most humans had been driven underground by the threat of death from the skies.
Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) trundled purposefully through abandoned and rubble-strewn streets laden with supplies — ammunition, water, rations, medical gear — for the hidden Ukrainian soldiers. UGV carcasses, wrecked by FPVs, were frequent too.
In the skies, a multitude of drones from both sides, flying low and sometimes loitering, either sustained humans or killed them. As the patrol moved deeper into the city, the route dictated by the availability of trees and overgrown bushes, it was regularly forced into taking cover by Russian FPV drones, easily distinguishable by their high-pitched whines.
Sometimes the soldiers fired up at the drones. As others passed, they stood silently under the leaves or in the sharp shadows thrown by the sun. The gossamer threads of fibre optic drones shimmered everywhere in the glare, and in some places tumbled drones hung lifeless in torn corridors of netting.
At around 11:30, near Druzhkivka’s ruined city hall, where a smoke-stained Ukrainian flag rippled in the summer breeze, a soldier pointed to a larger drone hovering in the sky. It appeared to have released a robotic hatchling, a smaller FPV which hovered nearby. “Mothership drone,” said the soldier, Misha, a heavily tattooed veteran of the 93rd Brigade. He explained that the Russians regularly used longer range, larger drones to carry smaller FPV kamikaze drones to the proximity of their targets, extending the kamikaze’s scope. “It’s not just drones we have to think about,” Misha added. “Some of the drones have dropped petal mines in the city. And it’s 50/50 that we encounter a Russian infiltration group.”
Indeed, though the nearest fixed Russian positions are still seven miles south of Druzhkivka, small teams of Russian infiltration troops make frequent attempts to cross through the grey zone and reach the city. Sometimes they succeed. Three Ukrainian drone pilots were found dead inside a building in Druzhkivka this week, likely killed by infiltrators. “Infiltration is the biggest problem for my guys,” said Lt Colonel Yehor Derevianko, 43, a rifle battalion commander with 93rd Brigade, whose troops defend Druzhkivka’s southwestern flank.
“Sometimes the Russians send infiltration groups that take a week to cover 20 kilometres,” he added. “They do it constantly. In one of our positions my guys killed or captured two Russian infiltrators a day, every day, for a week. They just kept coming, using exactly the same route.”
Night brings scant protection from the drones. Russian FPVs with thermal imaging cameras can easily identify the heat traces of vehicles and humans, hunting them down in the darkness. Casualty evacuation and troop movement, difficult enough in daylight, become even more difficult once the sun has gone down.
Adding to Ukraine’s challenges, a further 25 teams from Russia’s elite “Rubicon” drone warfare organisation have been newly committed to the area around Druzhkivka and Kramatorsk, according to Ukrainian intelligence, leading to an increase in the precision and regularity of drone strikes.
Recent footage also suggests that the Russians are using audio-reactive drones, which wait in concealed positions before being triggered to activate by the sound of approaching vehicles, allowing the machines to hunt and kill by sound rather than sight alone. “The range and targeting of Russian drones is much deeper now,” acknowledged Derevianko. “The Russians aren’t shy with ammunition either; they are quite prepared to target a position with just two soldiers in it with KABs [glide bombs] and fibre optic drones. When they focus on hitting us with everything they have, our positions are just turned into holes.”
A desperate message on a doorway of an apartment block passed by the patrol on Druzhkivka’s southern side in the early afternoon, hinted at the effect of the war on the few civilians left in the city. “Help, call the evacuation,” the message read. “Apartment 86. Can’t walk. Please. I am sorry for everything.”
Of the city’s pre-invasion population of 54,000, only 3,300 people are estimated to remain, most eking out an existence underground. Specialist evacuation groups can no longer access many areas of Druzhkivka, for fear of drones, so remaining civilians have been encouraged by authorities to leave by foot. There are no longer any emergency services nor utilities functioning in Druzhkivka; no ambulances, no firefighters, no police; no water, no electricity, no gas.
In this desolate urban wilderness the true toll of civilian deaths is unknown. As the patrol moved through bombed areas, some ruins reeked of rotting flesh. Shallow graves appeared among the rubble, too. Marlen Umerov, 53, had been buried in the centre of a boulevard beside a huge apartment complex ripped in half by a KAB bomb, alongside an unknown body. Elsewhere, the patrol moved past the improvised grave of Mikhail Oliferenko, 71, on a verge, shrouded with webs of fibre-optic drone wire.
Some of the dead never even made it to the grave. On the fifth floor of one abandoned apartment block, the decaying body of a man lay half on the floor, half on a bed, as if he had tried and failed to find a final resting place. One of his hands had been gnawed off and carried to a pillow, and cats’ paw prints tracked across the floor.
A Ukrainian soldier dry-retched repeatedly in the stairwell. Outside the window, a drone cruised slowly past at eye level: robotic sentinel to a lonely death.
Among those civilians who remain here, some are too poor or ill to leave. Others are pro-Russian, nicknamed “waiters” by the Ukrainians, they elected to wait out the horrors for the Russians to come.
Interactions between the Ukrainian soldiers and civilians therefore varied. “Hey, you should get to an evacuation point and leave here, it’s incredibly dangerous” one soldier advised, with genuine concern, a woman trudging past ruins dragging a trolley behind her. “It’s dangerous, yes,” she replied. “But surely it can’t get any worse.” “It will get much worse,” said the soldier. “You should leave.”
In other areas the mood between soldiers and civilians was tense. “Waiters?” questioned Misha, noticing the cold stares he was given from a basement doorway. “I call them f**kers.”
As the afternoon warmed, the numbers of Russian FPVs above the patrol increased, and by 3pm the sense of being hunted had intensified. The soldiers regularly scrambled for cover under trees in overgrown gardens as Russian drones, sometimes working in pairs, loitered above them, robots and humans trying to wait one another out.
Walking the route to the extraction point took a long time, and by around 5pm when the soldiers reached the bridge over the river Kryvyi Torets, the situation was especially precarious.
A car lay end-up in a shell crater in the middle of the bridge. Two Russian FPV drones drifted back and forth, waiting for targets. A third, shot down, had ignited undergrowth on the bank, blurring the scene with smoke.
The soldiers crossed the bridge quickly and took cover in foliage on the other side. Max had appeared in his vehicle, with another soldier riding shotgun, in the true sense of the term, to extract the patrol.
The Russian FPVs saw him first. One suicide drone, clearly visible, streaked towards the vehicle at treetop level impossibly fast, pursued by frantic bursts of Kalashnikov fire from Misha and neighbouring troops. That FPV disappeared, either hit or incapacitated. A second immediately followed, amid more peals of automatic fire.
This time, the drone dropped at the key moment of its dive, and blew up beside Max’s extraction vehicle, shrouding it in a cloud of smoke and dust, splattering one side of it with shrapnel and blowing out windows. “Are you okay,” yelled the soldiers, running towards the vehicle. “Is anyone 300 [wounded]?”
Unwounded, Max and the second soldier, who had managed to leave the vehicle in time, emerged from the cover of a tree. With a quick skyward glance the patrol scrambled into the van, the barrels of their assault rifles smoking, and began the thunder run back down the H-20 highway. Under a setting sun they sped past the charred wreckage of those too slow, or those less lucky. Max was grinning by the time he reached the relative safety of Kramatorsk. It was the smile of a soldier who, twice in one day, had beaten the machines.
Anthony Loyd has been writing for the Times for over thirty years. He began his career reporting from the Bosnian war in 1993 and has since worked in multiple conflicts, including those in Ukraine, Chechnya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic. His special reports have included eye-witness dispatches from the siege of Sarajevo, the genocide in Srebrenica, the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, the defeat of Islamic State in Mosul, Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall in Libya, and the withdrawal of the US-led coalition from Afghanistan in 2021. Anthony exposed the use of Sarin gas by the Assad regime in Syria in 2013, and later discovered and interviewed Shamima Begum in 2019. His Times multimedia projects have included the short film ‘Another Man’s War’ from Ukraine, and the highly acclaimed podcast series ‘Last Man Standing’. Among his many awards for The Times the reporter has won foreign correspondent of the year five times in the British Press Awards , and twice won the prestigious Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents.