By Nick Paton Walsh, CNN
Druzhkivka, eastern Ukraine (CNN) — The “Road of Life” – pockmarked, laden with torched vehicles and covered with netting to block drones – fights its name. A lifeline resupplying Ukrainian troops on the toughest of front lines, sometimes by robotic delivery, the stretch of asphalt from Druzhkivka to Kostyantynivka is purely about survival.
Ukrainian troops, often emerging exhausted after months pinned down in the same position, move almost exclusively by foot, passing the burned-out vehicles of those who chose to try to dodge the drones with speed, rather than by being small.
Drones now rule the war in Ukraine and the only protection from Russia’s endless stream of aerial attacks is to hide in the trees, shoot them down, or ultimately hope they decide on another, bigger target – normally vehicles, or military equipment.
It’s a technological shift that’s reconfigured modern warfare and, for now at least, given Ukraine breathing room against a much larger adversary. But for troops operating in the so-called “kill zone,” extending miles deep along the front lines, every move in the open risks lethal peril.
The CNN team walked a small, supposedly safer section of the road between two Ukrainian positions, accompanied by Kosta, Sasha and Bohdan, from the 24th Mechanized Brigade. An hour’s proposed walk each way turned into a five-hour ordeal, with at least 14 attacks from, or close encounters with, Russian drones.
The first comes quickly, and just after a rare pair of tanks have passed. The buzz of drones above, and then gunfire, the woodland and damaged houses around suddenly alive with the Ukrainian troops hidden in them, firing at the skies. It is a cue to run into a courtyard, as our escorts try to see if there is any target to fire at, in the grey, overcast soup above.
On the road outside, Sasha and Kosta are bolder, firing from the open. And they hit their target, the thud of the drone’s explosive payload flashing on the tarmac, about 500 feet away. We have to keep moving, as others may follow.
Drone warfare turns frontline norms on their head. Armor is a prime target, and a liability. Clusters of troops are a target. The protective netting that arches over so many of the roads in the eastern Donbas region – stopping drones in their tracks – is not your friend here, but a limitation on movement. When you hear a drone, you must run for the foliage, where you can hide and they cannot fly. Walk inside the protective nets, and you need to find, or cut, a hole to get into the woods.
Dodging drones also flips the human instinct to seek safety in numbers. You have to split apart, run from each other, as being alone makes you less interesting to a Russian attack pilot. A radio warning has our team running for the green again, the buzz above, gunfire echoing all around.
After an hour, the drone’s ubiquitous hum becomes hard to distinguish – is it your ears, or imagination? Your senses do not relax, but it is hard to remain as concerned by every drone noise as in the first minutes.
Our encounters with drones usually end with the explosive crash of one falling nearby. It is unclear who shot it down, where it was headed, or if it was alone. But the need to move washes away any time to process.
One drone flies right above our heads. Sasha and Bohdan’s fire – rifles at a distance and a shotgun when up close – bring it down. The damaged propellers whir eeri