Reporting from Kyiv
BBCIn a tight apartment in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, Pavlo, a 30 -year -old drone operator, who recently returned from the front, opened a black case about the size of a pizza box. Inside, there was a four-rotor drone that he intended to fly around the room.
He pressed the button on the control unit and pushed the antenna to separate positions. Nothing happened. “Sorry, not today,” he said, with a smile. The unit looked fine, but something was broken.
On the front, Pavlo, who asked for only identification by his first name, was a pilot of the First-Persen View (FPV) drone. These small, excessive psychiatrist drones contain front-faceing cameras that allow them to flow from far away. In the last one year, bomb -filled FPVs have been ubiquitous on the frontline in Ukraine, replacing heavy weapons characterized by the first phase of the war.
FPVs pursue armored vehicles, hunting infantry units through the traine and stalk individual soldiers to their death. “You can’t hide from FPV, and is useless to run,” Pavlo said. “You try to calm down as much as possible, and you pray.”
Even when an FPV is very high to view, or is hidden behind the corpus, soldiers can hear its specific, high-picked wine.
“BzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s,” said Pavlo. “You are being hunted.”
Getty imagesAfter more than a year on the front, Pavlo has returned home to the Kiev apartment shared with his wife. But the sound of the drone followed him. Every day mechanical equipment such as lawnmower, motorcycle and air conditioner reminds them of FPVs who hunted him and his unit’s companions.
And nature is not a migration. Pavalo can no longer hear the sound of bees and can fly near it without creeping. “I don’t like to go into nature anymore and listen to this sound, because it reminds me of the drone,” he said.
The shock associated with the sound is not new – after returning to civil life, sudden noise has affected the soldiers’ generations. But as the war has evolved into a struggle conducted by drone technology in Ukraine, trauma has developed with it.
“In the last one year, most patients – if they are not physically injured – have mental health injuries as a result of being under drone activity,” the chief psychiatrist of Kiev’s military hospital, Dr. Seri Andrechanko said. “We call this dronophobia.”
Dr. Andrechenko said that many thousands of men are now returning from the front like Pavlo, with the acute stress disorders associated with the sound of the drone, Dr. Andrichhenko said. Droneophobia an array of ordinary urban sounds – small motorcycle and scooter, lawnmower, air conditioner – anything mechanical that can be triggered by an array of whirrs.
“If it is a moped or a lawnmover, my first idea is that it could be a drone,” another frontline Soldier, Savar, said, who lost his hand in an FPV drone attack.
The drone on the front line was a “permanent sound”, Savar said, who asked to be identified by his callsine according to the military protocol. “The sound of a shell lasts for a few seconds, but the sound of the drone is mostly time,” he said.
“In your position, you can lie in your foxhole, and listen to it for hours. I remember this sound all the time.”
Or sometimes the problem was the opposite – silence. Psychiatrist Dr. Andrichhenko said, “Silence is always the beginning.” “When soldiers go to rotation to combat the positions, they start listening carefully to ensure that there are no drones. Constant stress, constant fear. They are always seeing.”
In many cases, the constant feeling of stress has not been overcome by the return of civil life. Soldiers are suddenly closed at home, moving away from windows and hidden under furniture.
Later, if a soldier is seen for treatment, Dr. Andrechenko describes how they often have no memory of any trigger sound, but their wife or family member will know that an extractor fan or air conditioner was just operational.
The soldiers of the earlier stages of the war – which was characterized by more cruel, more direct comparison – came home for fear of being in the forests, where there was a lot of fighting. But the drone Warfare has reversed the incident. Now soldiers “feel the safest in the forests under the canopies of the dense tree”, the psychiatrist said. “And in their free time, they try to avoid wooden areas.”
Increase in use of drones has had another terrorized effect for soldiers – it has launched the Danger Zone far behind the front line. Soldiers operating up to 40 km (25 mi), or pulling back after a heavy rotation, can no longer let your guard go down.
A commander of a small drone unit, Nazar Bokhi, was about 5 km from the contact line in a dugout a day, when his unit made a straight hit in the event of a Russian mortar 22 km away. Due to success, Bokhi excluded the dugout, forgot the general protocol of stopping first to listen to a teletel discussion.
At a distance of meter, a Russian FPV was lying in the air. As it moved towards him, Bokhi only had time to lift his arms. When this explosion occurred, it took both his hand and his left eye and burned his face badly.
Boki’s own PTSD was limited, he said, for a topical fear response to motorcycles and lawnmivers. But he knew about the effect of sound, he said, because his unit used it to terrorize others.
Bokhi said, “We were the aspects that were afraid of sound, not from the side who was suffering from it.”
He felt at some points that sound could be used to force Russian soldiers into exposed areas. “You discuss around them and it becomes a test of the psychological flexibility of the enemy,” Bokhi said. “The sound of a drone is a serious psychological attack.”
According to Bokhi, discussion over a soldier for a long time and he would leave a strong shelter and simply go to the open area. “Our psychology works in such a way that we need to do something to calm ourselves,” Bokhi said. “So you hover nearby and press it psychologically … and he starts running and becomes easy to hit.”
And the psychological terror of FPV is no longer a problem on the front line. It has reached beyond the areas behind the front lines. Russia has started using FPVs to release sages on citizens in Ukrainian cities nearby.
Between the worst hits, Kherson was captured by Russian forces in a southern city for a time and is still comfortably within the drone range. According to Human Rights Watch, Russian forces deliberately targeted citizens in the city with FPV drones and killed or killed them – a war crime.
According to the regional military administration, at least 84 civilians have been killed in the Kharson region as a result of Russian drone attacks so far this year.
Residents say small FPVs are a daily terror.
“There is no such thing as a safe place,” 23 -year -old border guard, Dimtro Olifiranko, said, who lives in Kherson City. “You always have to be vigilant, concentrate, and because of this, the body is under constant stress,” he said.
Stanislav Ostus/BBCOlifiranco was waiting at a bus stop in September when he heard the familiar sound of the Russian drone overhead. “We thought it would follow the bus, as they were hunting the civic buses,” he said.
Instead, the drone dropped its sages at the bus stop, sending pellets to the head, face and leg of Olifiranko. The video of the incident filmed by an audience caught the discussion of the drone, after which Olifiranko screamed, as he was bleed on the pavement.
Olifiranko now heard the drone “continuously”, he said, “He was there or not.” “This barely kills your mental and psychological health,” he said. “Even when you leave for mykolaiv or another city, you are constantly trying to listen.”
For citizens such as Olifarenco, the drone has changed the normal sounds of a populated area – a car, motorcycle, generator, lawnmower, air conditioner – in a psychological goutlet to run every day for citizens, even they contest themselves with the real danger of the drone.
For soldiers coming back from the front, like Pavlo, the drone has created a new and specific type of fear, one that is not easy.
“You see the world as a battleground,” said Pavlo. “It can become the field of any other battle.”
And all triggers, hearing – human meaning drones are exploiting so effectively – the most insidious, he said.
“When you see something, your brain can see it in a second, you can feel that it is very fast.
“But an unknown sound is different. Your brain has been changed. You cannot ignore it, you should answer. Because on the frontline, it can save your life.”
Switlana Libette contributed to this report. Photos by Joel Gunter.
