Slava Ukraine

Friday December 12 2025, The Times

It has been nearly four years since President Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, four years in which horror, grief and a wounded defiance have become the shared experience of a battered nation.

On his 16th assignment to meet the soldiers and civilians resisting Russia along a vast front line, Anthony Loyd finds Ukraine at a pivotal moment as support for its fight appears to be waning on the international stage. With Putin’s forces on the march again, and any hope of an immediate truce forlorn for now, this war diary sheds light on the agonising choices Ukrainians make every day as drones deliver death from above.

Amid rumours of peace and the daily certainties of war, horror and grief have become the shared experience. Ksiusha, 12, tells me of her father, Oleksandr, who was seized by a conscription squad as he walked home from a supermarket in March last year. He called Ksiusha from a barracks to say goodbye. She never saw him again. Oleksandr was declared missing in action after a mission near Bakhmut, only a few weeks after completing his basic training.

Later the badly shredded remains of a soldier — decomposed, missing its head and a leg, and with no more clothing than a single boot — was recovered from near where Oleksandr had last been seen alive. Ksiusha supplied three DNA samples to check whether the body was that of her father.

The bodies of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been stored in improvised morgues across the country, awaiting DNA matches with families of the missing to identify them. In Odesa, Tetiana Papizh, director-general of the Forensic Regional Bureau, oversees an operation at the railside morgue where more than 2,000 dead Ukrainian troops have been stored in refrigerated carriages.

Yet the remains believed to be Oleksandr ended up in Dnipro, and Ksiusha was asked to attend the forensic centre there with her mother, Valeriia, who was shown photographs of the corpse. Finally, DNA analysis confirmed that the ravaged body with the boot was that of Oleksandr. His body was brought back to Odesa and buried today.

After the funeral, I ask the family if there had been any point in exposing them to the horrors of the headless body. It seemed a brutal and unnecessary part of the identification process, experienced by relatives of the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers declared missing in action. “It was useful to see the body in the forensic centre to realise that it might be Oleksandr,” Valeriia says.

Just before Oleksandr’s funeral, she asked to see inside the coffin once more. “I wanted to check that the body with the boot on we had seen in the forensic centre was the same body they had given us to bury,” she explains. “It was. Same body, same boot. Oleksandr.”

“You can never get used to the sight or sound of a drone,” Dr Vitaly Khomukha says in a ward of wounded in Kherson’s Luchansky hospital. One of the men here, Vladimir Baidorov, had put a tourniquet on his own leg, using severed power cables to stop the bleeding, after treading on a petal mine dropped by a Russian drone. The mine had blown off his foot and severed an artery. Vladimir would have died if he had not used the cable to stop the blood. But by the time he reached hospital, the tourniquet had been on too long, so a surgeon amputated his leg above the knee. To save his life, Vladimir had lost his leg. Such are the options of Ukrainians.

“The sound of a drone causes instant panic,” Khomukha says. “What we have learnt is to alter our behaviour around drones. To live under nets and to avoid congregating. We have changed the way we live, but the fear of drones never goes.”

Anthony Loyd entering the hospital

It has been ten months since I last saw Khomukha, and he looks exhausted. Outside the hospital, a cold wind ripples leaves across the new canopy of anti-drone netting, and a barrage of Russian artillery explodes down the road. Drone casualties are huge among the population here.

Anti-drone netting

Such is the Russians’ enthusiasm for targeting civilians in Kherson that locals call their killing spree “drone safari”. So far this year, an average of 2,500 drone attacks have been recorded per week in Kherson. In the same period, 125 civilians have been killed here by drones and another 1,173 have been wounded.

Later, moving though the city by car, we take a detour down one of the un-netted areas abutting the river bank. Shrapnel-scythed cables lie across the tarmac. The streets are empty of people and the atmosphere has that strange, slightly nauseating electrical pulse suggesting that something is about to go very wrong. We have tried to prepare ourselves for an FPV strike. The fuel tank is deliberately full, as half-filled tanks contain more vapour and explode more easily. Our team is in full body armour, safety belts off, and a window breaker is attached to the interior in case the locking system is triggered by a strike. No one wants to be stuck in a burning car.

Then, as we round a corner in this deserted quarter, an FPV drone cuts fast through the air, left to right, just above us. The whirring whine of its rotors causes exactly the reaction Khomukha described: panic. “Drone! Drone!” I yell at the driver. “Go! Go!” In his surprise at my shouts, he instead slams on the brakes and stalls the vehicle.

The drone overshoots us and cuts down a street to our right, perhaps looking for less chaotic lifeforms to target. We swear and grumble among ourselves all the way back to Mykolaiv, nearly — but not quite — forgetting the instant terror caused by those whining rotor blades.

Nowhere is sacrosanct. I do not go to church very often, but I won’t forget my visit to the Christ is the Bread of Life Baptist Church any time soon. We first notice the church, shrouded by drone netting, from the road on Kherson’s west side. I hesitate to enter. The sky is blue and the sun warm. I turn to face the heat, chatting to a friend on the phone. Then I notice a small black dot, coming in low above the horizon. The dot gets bigger.

“Fuck! Russian drone,” I blurt to my friend, and hang up. A Molniya strike drone flies straight overhead and blows up two blocks away. Running into the church for cover I find the acting pastor, Yuri Lahozinskyi, and a few worshippers already there, gathered around a drone detection system. The screen picks up the live feed from the cameras of incoming drones, alerting the worshippers in real time to the Russians’ probable target.

As we watch, another kamikaze drone flies over the church, its voyage playing out on the screen as we stare. In the dystopia of Kherson, Ukrainians can watch their imminent fate through their killers’ eyes. The drone explodes elsewhere. Thank God, I think.

In the shadow of the drones, civilians with disabilities or chronic health conditions face appalling challenges. Many of the hospitals that are still open are near the front, or overloaded with wounded soldiers. Often pharmacies do not work. Transport links have been disrupted, and medical professionals have fled Kherson, leaving a dearth of specialists. Neurosurgeons, oncologists, cardiologists and traumatologists are rare. Some sick people are too scared to travel.

Others cannot walk. The stress on their carers is immense. “Every time the Russians shelled our village I had to carry my teenager in my arms to a shelter,” Ruslan Trokhymenko says, sitting beside his daughter, Diana. Diana, 17, has had severe brain damage since infancy, as well as diabetes and epilepsy. She cannot walk or talk, and cannot bathe or feed herself without assistance.

Nevertheless her family, trapped in the area by poverty, clung on in their riverside village caring for Diana, who requires daily insulin injections, sugar level checks and medication. The buildings around them have been reduced to ruins by bombardments and air strikes. “The stress of looking after a disabled child in the war has been beyond extreme,” Ruslan says. “Even under normal circumstances Diana needs a lot of care. Our nerves are like tight wires.”

Throughout the war I have met soldiers who have told me mighty fishermen’s tales of catfish, pike and zander. They cook their freshwater fish imaginatively, too, and travellers in the east would be foolish not to try the pike patties and baked zander in Dnipro’s restaurants.

I respond to the soldier’s boasts in kind, talking — with advantage — of the large barbel I caught in the River Helmand, the enormous carp I landed in Saddam’s palace lake in Tikrit and the many, many perch I took from the Shatt al-Arab in Basra during the fighting there between British soldiers and the Jaish al-Mahdi.

In Dnipro, I forget the war and the drones, rise early and take a spinning rod out to the east bank of the Dnieper River. Here, in the grounds of a Ukrainian Orthodox Church, I am determined to catch a massive Ukrainian pike.

It is a forlorn hope, however. In the cold my fingers soon turn a strange hue of purple, then blue, and lose all sensation as the heat is sucked from my bones. I catch nothing, and soon abandon the venture to go to a café for some scrambled eggs and coffee, consoling myself that the fishing conditions were poor anyway. If it had been two degrees warmer I would surely have caught a big pike.

The fish had disappeared but then so too, for those few hours on the Dnieper, had the war.

Every single man in the team of DTEK electricians north of Pokrovsk has lost his home in the past few months. Driving to reconnect power lines cut by shellfire, Vitalii, the team’s chief electrical engineer, tells me how his own home in the city was obliterated. As he speaks, the landscape around us slides by in a grey smear of ruined houses, trenches and drone netting. The drone alarm on the dashboard squawks intermittently, and shellfire rumbles in the near distance.

Vitalii says that he had built his home in Pokrovsk with his father in the 1990’s. First, 18 months ago, as the Russian push towards began, a Russian rocket killed two of his neighbours. Vitalii sent his wife and young daughter to live in Kyiv for safety. By the new year, with Pokrovsk under heavy bombardment, Vitalii left too, having first stocked the cellar in his home with water and winter rations for Ukrainian soldiers as the battle for the city started.

Two months ago, by which time the house was almost surrounded and in ruins, a group of Ukrainian soldiers withdrew from the basement, carrying two of their wounded with them. They took the time to text Vitalii’s elder daughter a thank-you. “We lived in your home in Pokrovsk. It was a cosy castle, but we are sorry to tell you that it was burnt and destroyed,” the text, on September 28, said. “Thank you for the food and rations. It helped us survive and sustain our wounded.”

Vitalii stops the car and his team starts work on a job in a village where a double missile strike has torn apart electrical cables and a row of houses. As the men work to reconnect the lines, a pack of abandoned dogs tear into one another in the rubble. Cold rain falls and salvos of Grad rockets fire in the distance. I ask Vitalii if he thinks he will ever be able to go back to his house in Pokrovsk. “I understand that I may never see my own home again,” he says after a while. “But it is totally destroyed. The home I built no longer exists. There is nothing of that home to go back to.”

Most Ukrainian soldiers prefer shotguns over AK-47s to shoot down drones. Cartridges with light birdshot are the munition of choice, as the shot has more spread. Nevertheless, in the scramble to develop anti-drone guns, Ukraine has developed several types of drone-net pistols, such as the Ptashka.

The concept is cool. The pistol fires a Spiderman-type net that can — at least in theory — take down a small FPV drone at close range. In practice, though, the chances of accurately firing a one-shot small net from a pistol at a fast-moving drone are hopelessly slim. The flaw in the idea becomes apparent when we drive to the outskirts of Kramatorsk with a couple of soldiers from the 93rd Brigade, who have offered to fire a net pistol to satisfy my curiosity.

The soldiers move around in a camouflaged and armoured cash delivery vehicle, donated by a Polish company, as protection against drone strikes. Travelling with them feels a bit like the start of a fun day trip. But no sooner have the soldiers parked in a field and fired the net — rather anticlimactically, I thought — into the air than their drone alarms squawk. Anti-drone units in a nearby woodline start shooting into the sky, and a Russian FPV drone cruises along the trees towards us.

Rather than trying to reload the net pistol, a soldier grabs a shotgun and walks out from cover to get a clearer shot at the drone, which disappears from view, causing more alarm than when it was visible. We get back into the cash delivery van and leave, fast.

“When I was a boy, I had a childhood without computers and without mobile phones,” a soldier with an anti-drone unit from the 93rd Brigade — callsign Podol — tells me. He is 56 years old, and put up billboards for a living before he was mobilised last year. He adds, as an aside, that his longest unbroken stint in the trenches to date is 218 days, three seasons, a period in which he lost 38lbs. “In this war I have found myself, as a grandfather, in trenches, using a shotgun against weapon systems I could never have imagined as a child,” he adds. “The only way to deal with any of this, the constant uncertainty, is to concentrate on surviving the day.”

What’s in Anthony Loyd’s kit bag?