On a foggy night, when interceptors are looking for Russian drones. The Times.
There is nothing amazing about the office in Kiev. The open space is equipped with desks, keyboards and monitors. Only the mouse pads, each with bloody hands printed on them, hint at the work in progress. Young men in black clothes pass by the guards on duty so as not to draw attention to the location of the office.
Over the next 12 hours, they hunted down the Russian soldiers and their UAVs.
On one screen, a stream of about 50 red arrows hurtles southwest across the Russian border, each arrow representing a long-range enemy kamikaze UAV. Radar tracks their flight paths.
In the east and west the country was shrouded in autumnal fog.
“Look at these tracks. If there were no clouds, we would have intercepted these targets much earlier," says Reiser, a pilot first class with the Lazar group, the special unmanned systems unit of the Ukrainian National Guard. The rider is looking for a target in one of his areas of responsibility - a yellow circle on the interactive map, which covers an area of hundreds of kilometers to the east.
This underground command center is quiet and calm, a far cry from the dizzying cacophony of combat closer to the front lines.
The war looks sterile and lifeless, it's hard to compare the red pixels on the map to the terror felt by those under the UAVs they represent. The rider knows that in every intercepted flight, lives are in danger. Before he can order the ground crew to prepare the interceptor for takeoff, the Red Arrow disappears, shot down by a Ukrainian missile.
"The missile can operate in bad weather because it has its own guidance system," notes Major Roman "Fish", deputy commander of the Lazar group. "Unfortunately, now drones are penetrating the territory of Ukraine in significant numbers.