That was close!

Nearly blown up by a drone

I have been bombed, shelled, and rocketed a lot over the two and half years I have been in Ukraine, and the two years I have been in the army, but this was my closest call, just yesterday, perhaps at the very end of my career in the army here. I have sat in our bunker and had an artillery barrage pound us for nearly an hour, with many of the impacts shaking the bunker and dislodging little cascades of earth from the walls. I have been shelled nearly every hour for days on end. I have had large aerial bombs land close enough to blow all the windows out of our ambulance parked outside, and the windows out of the house that we were staying in at that time where our stabilization point was set up, the glass blown into the room we were in. There’s something a little more personal about having a drone attack you though. Unlike artillery or mortar shells, or rockets, or even gliding aerial bombs that have a set destination, a drone is being actively aimed by a person somewhere, guiding it right at you.

It’s also a little odd showing up (after a fashion) in the public daily statistics.

Yesterday was a record setting day in the amount of drones Ukraine shot down. This is because Russians are celebrating Christmas by attacking Ukraine with very large amounts of drones and rockets, as well as pushing hard on the frontlines. Many of the days over the past two weeks they lost well over a thousand men either badly wounded or killed and they actually scrounged up some tanks and armored personnel carriers to get blown up trying to crack our lines. The drone that attacked me isn’t counted in the numbers of drones shot down there of course, it impacted the ground right in front of us, and although the only wounded weren’t soldiers, or even humans, it did damage a military vehicle, albeit only lightly. Still, when I saw that statistic this morning of drones shot down, I couldn’t help but think of myself being counted in the negative space of that infographic for the war yesterday, the drones that got through.

Update: the 16th Corps has released its stats for that day. The drone that attacked us was one of 104 kamikaze drones in the 16th Corps Area of Operations that day. Probably all four of those KAB aerial bombs were launched at the bridge we were about to cross over as well. -

It was our day to rotate home from the front. Today, we’d get an early start and take my armored ambulance, from our forward stabilization point here, to partway back to where our “rear area” aid station is in REDACTED. That aid station serves as a sort of clinic for our troops when they aren’t at the frontline and as a sort of a base for the medical unit. There, we keep another team, working at the aid station, and available to transport any wounded the rest of the way to the hospital, so the four-wheel drive evac ambulance (currently, my armored one, thank you everyone!) can return to duty at the front and be promptly available for the next casualty.

Many of the roads here are truly appalling, much of the asphalt gone and replaced by so many potholes that it looks like an asymmetrical Connect Four boardgame laid on its side. So many potholes that despite using the entire width of the road and both shoulders, there sometimes isn’t a line to drive through it without hitting potholes. This makes for slow going, especially when you have injured in the back of the rig. Few things I hate more than hearing our soldiers crying out in pain as the ambulance lurches over the rough roadway, so I do what I can to minimize this as much as possible, which means going even slower than we are normally forced to, but still the road is so bad I can’t spare them all of the pain caused by the journey.

The roads are hit or miss though. The road from the aid station to Kharkiv barely has a few potholes in it. This contributed to why we were leaving early and taking my armored ambulance halfway back to do our changeover of personnel, because a few days before, the crew supposed to be going on rotation hit black ice and rolled the units diesel Toyota.

(Rare image not taken by me, I didn’t snap any shots from this angle.)

This not only took it out of service, along with the units’ only other drone jammer array, which was damaged in the crash, but it forced me to go back on rotation two days early, as the driver for the rotation going on-shift had to stay with the damaged vehicle to see if it was drivable back to our mechanics after they came and got it back onto its wheels. Not only did this incident leave us short of vehicles, I was only planning on and prepared to be the “rear area” duty driver and didn’t have many of the things I would usually take with me on rotation.

Luckily, I had gotten in the habit of bringing my vest and helmet with me when I was “just” supposed to be duty driver at the “rear area” aid station, because occasionally, I did get called on to go forward to places I definitely needed it. Nonetheless, I didn’t have my sleeping bag or pillows with me, nor enough food with me for the rotation forward at our stabilization point, nor was I wearing my warmest clothes, and I didn’t bring the extra layer with me I usually did. Those last two can be really telling when you spend several hours standing around outside on a below freezing night waiting for the first leg of the evacuation to get to you.

Here, on the Vovchansk front, the border guards are in charge of the sector and insist on doing the first, most dangerous leg of the evacuations while our M113 sits idle in the rear. It feels like cheating not having to do the part under direct fire, but honestly, my ambulances armor is just enough to stop most shrapnel and small arms fire. A Toyota pickup truck, even an armored one still isn’t the correct vehicle to be using to pull wounded out under direct enemy fire, so I have somewhat reconciled myself to the current protocols, but I still don’t like it. It feels like someone else is doing my job for me. Not that there isn’t plenty of danger on the second leg of the evac route. I am glad for the armor on my ambulance every time we do it, as the drone threat is very serious and extends many kilometers deep from the front line, as we will see with today’s tale, and we are well within artillery range at those rendezvous sites. We often hear it falling nearby while waiting for patients. Yes, we do have that M113, but if history is any guide, it’d be down for repairs within a week. Three, tops.

Now where were we? Hopefully, my digressions are enlightening and entertaining. Ah, yes, heading “home” from the front.

I woke up before the rest of the team. I’d need to warm up the truck and bring it around from the hide a few hundred meters away to the stabilization point. And, I’d need to clean the mud flung up onto the mirrors and side windows off. Also, I carry more gear than everyone else, and I needed to stage it in the front room while I didn’t have my muddy boots on. Maybe it’s because they are virtually always inside a medical location or a stocked ambulance, but it seems like most of my medical units’ people don’t carry a first aid kit. I think I am the only one that carries a gas mask. And since we aren’t going right up to the Zero Line right now, very few others are lugging their weapons around. I got the heads up that we might have to help out driving for infantry rotations though, which means driving all the way to the Zero Line, so I bring my rifle with me on rotations forward too.

There’s no bathroom plumbing here, so first I make my way through the mud to the outhouse a few dozen meters away. I’ve been a little dehydrated the past few days, I tend to wake up a lot in the middle of the night, and if I need to pee, can’t get back to sleep, so have been purposefully running myself a little dry, because getting the rest of the way dressed, getting my boots on, and going out into the bitter cold is not only miserable, but it is hard to get back to sleep afterwards. I shouldn’t let my body get dehydrated; it isn’t good for my damaged heart. I won’t miss anything about all of these aspects of the war.

I was pleased a few days ago when it snowed again, and the ground froze properly. Most of the farm roads became traversable again. These are far smoother and faster than taking the badly potholed county roads but turn into deep seas of mud and ponds for part of the year. Now, I was dismayed to see that the weather had once again vacillated back to just warm enough to melt the snow and at least make the surface of the ground muddy again. I’d risk the farm roads again on the way back, as I suspected that the ground was still now mostly firm under the top layer of mud, but it added a bit of anxiety to the trip, and I wasn’t pleased about it. Besides, now I had to worry about mud splattering the windows and mirrors again. The battle against mud here is Sisyphean.

I wake the guys up just before I go to warm up the truck and bring it around. They tell me that the plan has changed, we are now leaving a half hour later. Thanks guys, way to communicate! I could’ve used the extra sleep. This is news to me, and I wouldn’t have woken them a half hour before they were apparently planning on getting up if they had told me. We had a patient here and all the activity and noise that entails until after 0200, so I am running short of sleep again. Another thing not good for my heart and I am looking forward to leaving behind when my part in this war ends.

The hand-off goes smoothly; we only end up waiting a few minutes for the other vehicle to arrive. Which is good, because although we are just out of artillery range of the front here, there are still drones to worry about, although this far away there are a lot fewer of them. You mostly only have to worry about the drone carriers this deep. Those are bigger drones, carrying smaller attack drones. This greatly extends the attack drone’s range and helps get around jamming, as the mothership acts as a radio relay station for the attack drones, as well as helping spot targets and observing and recording the attacks. Somewhere out there is video of the attacks on our troops too, that the Russians are gleefully sharing amongst themselves and their simps on Twitter and other social media sites. I won’t be surprised to stumble across footage of this attack on me at some point. It wouldn’t be the first time we have viewed enemy attacks on our unit through their eyes.

We’ve mostly been able to use the farm roads alongside the terrible county road thus far on the trip back. There’s a slick, icy layer of mud on top, but the ground underneath is firm now, probably still mostly frozen. It’s not deep mud at least. It's a little treacherous, but it’s traversable, and much smoother and faster than the ‘paved’ road is, but we’ll have what feels like a seemingly interminable stretch of that bad road ahead. We’ve all been down this horrible stretch of road too many times. The passage seems to take forever. Occasionally we will have to be on the paved road for a bit to get from one farmer’s road to the next accessible or usable one. Some of them still have big ponds at the entrances of them where you drop down off the tarmac road onto them. Big enough to daunt us even in my lifted Toyota with its big off-road tires, much less this stock one. We may have snorkels, but I worry the mud might be deep in the giant pond-like puddles, and I don’t like to subject vehicles to fording if I don’t have to, even ones with snorkels. Some of the farm roads that aren’t blocked by miniature lakes are in too rough of shape to even contemplate, between being a mass of rough ruts or apparently still waterlogged and appear to be deep mud. And then, as we near the end of the road to the Siversky Donets River, we are forced onto the terrible tarmac road again for another ten or fifteen minutes of bumping along slowly over endless potholes, often at less than twenty kilometers per hour.

I have always wondered how the farmers feel about everyone using their land this way. Most farms have their own dirt road the rings their property for access, but over the course of the year, that road gets deeply rutted as people continue to use it when it starts getting badly muddy. Then, others will drive around the farmers’ road, alongside it, beating a new dirt road into the farmers’ ploughed field. My spell correct wants to convert my American English (plow, plowed) into UK standard. I am going to let that one stand. Over the course of a year, a farmer might lose a significant chunk of his land to these roads that people are carving through his property, as five or more are made, then abandoned as they each get too muddy (deep), or the frozen ruts in them make them nearly unusable. We got a hint of how they might feel about his when over the past week a farmer came through and reploughed his land, erasing all but the original farm road, and leaving rough, frozen, chunky earth, resistant to forging a new trail in it. For whatever it is worth, it isn’t just the army driving on his land, delivery vehicles and the locals eschew their battered road too, those that haven’t fled this dangerous area, with the Russians slowly creeping closer again. This area was liberated in the counter-offensive around Kharkiv in late 2022, but folks living here already spent six months under Russian occupation. Although quite a few people remain, some fled, in some cases evidenced by their unharvested fields. The benzene Toyota has a few stowaways in the form of sunflower heads trapped in the empty foglight housings from traversing some of these unharvested fields:

As we finally near the end of the bad road, we get intel pushed to us that says that Russian Molniya(s?) are over Stary Saltiv. Now, this requires two more digressions before we get to the action, as it were.

Staryi Saltiv is a small town dating back to the early 1600’s that sits alongside the western bank of the Siversky Donets river, which is quite wide at this point. There is a bridge here, the span shortened by a point of land reaching out from each shore. I have been regularly crossing the bridge here for a year now. The original civilian span was blown earlier in the war, and although Ukraine has almost completely rebuilt it, they haven’t filled in the center section yet. It almost appears to me that they have been reluctant to finish it, expecting the Russians to then promptly blow up the expensive new bridge, and so haven’t quite completed it, leaving a section that could be quickly filled in with a temporary span if the military pontoon bridge alongside that we have been using is hit.

That pontoon bridge was hit a couple of weeks ago. Less than an hour after I drove over it on my way to the front. It was hit again while the engineers worked at reconstructing the pontoon bridge. Both of these were with the big KAB aerial glide bombs. The engineers then constructed a classic Bailey bridge over the gap in the uncompleted civilian bridge and then went back to work reconstructing the pontoon bridge again.

I am not giving away any state secrets here, I pulled that image off of Twitter, because it is out there in the public domain. Besides, the Russians have observation drones over this area every day. They know what we’ve got and what is going on here.

Which is kind of ironic in a way. Because in this area, we aren’t considered to be in a “combat zone” and thus ineligible for combat pay when in this area. Despite drones hitting so regularly that netting is being put up over the main street through town, and big KAB bombs falling on it regularly too. The cluster of shops in town is right at the end of the short causeway leading onto the bridge and the town isn’t very big. The school has been blown up, and the Ukrainian government is constructing and underground one to replace it. But the army, in its infinite wisdom, and acute financial sense, has deemed this not to be a combat zone. I am quite sure the civilians that still live here would disagree with them. I know I do. I did even before I just missed getting bombed going over the bridge and then got hit by a drone driving up to it and just missed being hit by more bombs falling on the bridge.

The Russian Molniya drones have evolved and split over several evolutionary trees. The first version was a simple “FPV” drone. Piloted by a person wearing a headset over their eyes, giving them a “first person view” through the drones’ camera. These drones had their own warhead. And by simple, I mean really simple. Think one step up from popsicle sticks fuselage and scrap Styrofoam wings.

Some versions have wings made out of a cheap wood described as “plywood”, some wings are Styrofoam, some use two cheap pipes for the fuselage, and some look slightly more refined than the above example, but each of the three main versions share a basic design. While still being cheaply constructed (reports of as low as $300), the Molniya’s now have two engines, longer range, and come in Starlink equipped recon versions, and mothership versions, capable of carrying up to four FPV’s. The latter were the ones I already hated.

Mothership drones have pushed the danger zone from FPV attacks from up to 20 kilometers from the front line, to now 30 to 40 kilometers from the front line or further.The battlefield has changed once again. It had already changed completely from what it was like a year and a half ago, but doubling the depth of the danger zone is a huge change. And, with the Molniyas often carrying multiple attack drones, they are capable of follow-up attacks if the first ones fail. It makes me nervous when we get intel pushed to us that there are Molniyas overhead nearby, because although it might just be a recon version, in the areas where I am often operating it is quite possible it is a mothership version and there are now potentially multiple attack drones roving around looking for targets, like a nice Toyota truck. One of the times recently I had the ambulance positioned forward of our stabilization point and was waiting for the patient I was to evacuate to be delivered to us, we got the word that Molniyas were spotted above the next village over, just a couple of kilometers away. Those two little villages were barely separated by a couple of fields. I nervously eyed the thin overhead concealment provided by the winter trees and willed the first team to get there soon. I hope to have that run written up soon, this one kind of overshadowed it.

Now, we had gotten the word again, and we were maybe ten minutes away from Staryi Saltiv and Molniyas were reported above it. I considered having us just stop under some trees somewhere and wait for a bit, expecting that if it was a mothership, it’d expend its drones attacking targets fairly quickly and we’d be safe to race across the bridge and head home.

Oleksii considered the same, then we spotted smoke ahead. Something had just gotten hit, and he assumed that the Molniya was only carrying a single attack drone, or would expend the others by the time we got there, and so we pressed ahead.

Now, just before you get to the causeway onto the bridge from the north, there is a traffic control checkpoint manned both by police and the military. The police are in regular uniforms, but wearing bullet-proof vest plate carriers and carrying Kalashnikovs. In the city, a lot of police will have the extra small “Krinkov” AK-74SU, shortened folding stock version like I have, but at checkpoints like this, basically out in the country, they tend to carry regular, full size, wooden stocked AK-74’s.

The road forms a ‘Y’ here, with the checkpoint along the southeast, and one leg of the road continuing south along the river, and another heading west, over the river and into Staryi Saltiv and on to Kharkiv. Again, I ain’t giving away any secrets here, Russian drones fly over this spot every day. That’s why they’ve put netting up over the intersection, to protect the troops and police manning it 24/7.

Similar these nets on the road between Kharkiv and Kramatorsk.

When the bridge first got blown again recently, they had moved barriers across the road that led to it. When it reopened to traffic, they only half moved them out of the way forming a bit of a chicane, slowing you down quite a bit, whereas before, you could kind of blow through the checkpoint at about 30 miles an hour. I don’t think they ever once stopped me, or even made as if they wanted to as I rolled through here before. When there was a cop or soldier visible, they responded to us waving from our military vehicle, and we just blew through at as safe a speed as we could while negotiating the narrow lanes of the checkpoint and its curve.

Now, I slowed to weave around the barrier still half blocking the road and immediately spotted an old white Lada sedan stopped in front of me. The other thing that immediately got my attention was that the police officer standing in the middle of the road a couple of meters from the driver’s door had his rifle half up.

I don’t think I have ever seen a Ukrainian police officers’ rifle not dangling from its sling or very casually carried. The fact that this officer had his AK in low ready told me something was up. Either he had serious concerns about the driver of that Lada, which seemed unlikely, but was possible, or he was expecting a drone to come in range of his carbine and I knew that drones had at least just been overhead, and some may still be. Uh-oh.

I brought us to a halt probably a little under ten meters from where the Lada was halted, which put us nearly at the edge of the cover provided by the drone netting overhead and to the sides. Because of the curvature of the road, I hadn’t spotted the halted Lada in front of me early enough to stop any sooner really, and I was expecting the cop to wave him on, and then wave us through, and when I first registered the car in front of me expected that I’d just keep rolling at low speed. If I had known a drone was going to attack us, I might’ve stomped on the brakes and halted us a bit further back under the netting. Then again, if I had, the drone pilot might’ve slowed down to properly fly under the net and make sure he hit us, and it would have been worse. Who knows, but these are the things that go through your mind after something like this happens to you.

So, just as I pull up to a halt, maybe thirty feet behind the civilian sedan, the officer kind of urgently says something to its driver and starts walking towards me. For his first few steps, I can tell he is agitated, but he isn’t running yet like he is in danger. As we eased to a stop, I cranked my window down so I, or more properly, one of the two Ukrainian speakers sitting next to me, could speak to him. Although I had the password of the day memorized and was ready to deliver it, I felt like he had something more to say. Maybe the bridge just got blown again and the Lada that was pulling away was just doing so far enough to get enough room to turn around.

Nope. After he takes a couple of steps towards me, he takes a quick, frightened glance over his shoulder and immediately breaks into a run that would have taken him past us, in the direction we had just come. Deeper under the anti-drone netting. At the same time as he starts to break into a run, I hear it.

That’s a drone, it is diving, and it is headed right for us. I think at first it didn’t see us, as we had just come around the corner and were screened by trees before that, and were in a mud covered, dark green truck, under the drone net, and the drone was initially aiming for either the poor Lada or just the solo policeman standing in the middle of the road. Both sides use incredible numbers of drones to attack single individuals. Multiple new videos of individuals being targeted by both sides are posted every day. Probably the majority of the more than a thousand Russian soldiers killed or badly wounded every day are at the hands of drones, whether FPV “kamikaze” drones, bomber drones that drop grenades, mortar rounds, or repurposed mines, or from troops in vehicles hit by drones with anti-tank warheads. We don’t lose nearly as many people each day, but the Russians do put up a LOT of drones every day, enough for them to also hunt individual people. It seems crazy to expend a drone killing a single soldier, but if nothing else, if the drone is on a one-way trip and the battery is getting low, a single soldier as a target is better than nothing at all.

Then, that drone diving down onto the checkpoint must’ve spotted us. Because I’d swear, I heard the thing trying to change directions at the last minute. But it was moving fast. And us being just barely back under the anti-drone netting complicated its approach. It could have hit us directly, if its operator had just slowed down and took the time to line up his approach properly and aim.

At the same time though, the police officer stopped running for a heartbeat and started to raise his rifle. Now, it isn’t unheard of to bring down a drone with a rifle, but you have to be lucky, or damned good. We had a light machine gunner in the Legion that took down four of them in row, one right after the other, standing with that long-barrelled, nose-heavy thing before the fifth one wounded him and most of the rest of his squad. Dude was a master or a savant with that weapon. But most folks, it’s more akin to buying a lottery ticket. Still, the cop pausing his flight, even just for a split second to start raising his rifle to give it a go, might’ve contributed to the drone operator continuing his high-speed dive instead of slowing down and making a careful approach to be sure of a kill. That kill being me. He was probably already committed to his attack anyway and may well not be savvy enough to ever try slow speed approaches, hell, his unit may have a standing order forbidding them, but again, such are the things that go through your head after such an incident. Better that than shrapnel.

The policeman changed his mind about trying to take down the drone with his AK, while he was already running the other direction, and it was already diving towards us at high speed and he went from starting to stop moving and raising his rifle to committing back to running. And then it hit.

It was pretty loud. In a way, I am kind of surprised it wasn’t louder though. At first, I thought it hit between me and the cop, who was parallel with my door at this point and two or three meters away in the middle of the road, because the first thing I saw of the blast was the dust filled shockwave flowing between the two of us.

Later, when I ran back to the truck to pull it out of the intersection before it could get hit again, I didn’t spare any of my attention to spot exactly where the drone hit. Oleksii said he thought it was a good ten meters away when it impacted. He might well be right. If I had to guess though, I’d say it was closer, maybe half that distance, but I didn’t happen to spot its impact site when I ran around the back of the truck to close the passenger door that the guys left open when they bailed out, nor when I then ran around the front of the truck to get to my side and hop in.

I was also distracted by all the military police and cops that came out of the woodwork to shout at me in Ukrainian as I ran to and then around the truck. I don’t know what they were trying to tell me, but I had orders to pull our truck out of there, and those orders made good sense to me, and I am quite literally perhaps one of the people on this planet most used to disobeying police orders, so I ignored whatever they were commanding me to do while shouting back at them “I am turning this truck around and going that way”, while pointing south, in case they were trying to tell me that KAB’s were inbound, the bridge was about to be blown, and I shouldn’t try and drive across it.

Because they were. That’s exactly what they were trying to tell me.

I was focused on getting the truck turned around, and to my regret didn’t look for the impact site as I did so. And so, I can’t say for sure how close it impacted to us. Too damned close, that’s for sure.

But I am getting a little ahead of the story.

The drone exploded right in front of us, and most likely a little to the left of the way we were facing. We all immediately bailed out of the truck. I don’t think anything was said, but none of us wanted to stay in that target, there were bunkers right there and this was our gasoline powered Toyota since the diesel powered one with the jammers was the one that rolled two days before. Gas has a LOT higher tendency to catch fire and/or go boom than diesel. So, in American military parlance, we un-assed the vehicle with a quickness and made for the nearest bunker.

This was right across the street from us and an above ground one made of big stacked concrete blocks. Each block probably almost a meter thick by about two meters long, by about a meter maybe a meter and a half tall. For my American friends, like almost two Jersey barriers thick (or full thickness from the base) and two thirds as long, roughly. I am not going to do the conversions into bananas or washing machines for you.

We all ran up to the bunker, the three of us right behind the cop. He ran right past the bunker, so we stopped outside it, wondering if there was a good reason not to go in it, like a much better bunker across the street or something. The cop just stopped in the lee of the bunkers wall away from the nearest road opening in the anti-drone netting and turned around and looked at us in amazement and tried to catch his breath.

(One of my passengers took this photo.)

I was amazed too. Dude was untouched. That friggin’ bomb went off like right next to him it seemed like. Not a scratch on him. We had all seen our windshield immediately star when the explosion happened, both by the blast wave and the pieces of shrapnel that hit it. I had forgotten I had rolled my window down all the way to talk to the cop and glancing from untouched him to our truck sitting in the road behind us I assumed the driver’s side window had been blown in too until I remembered that I had no recall of that happening. I happily rolled up the intact window a short while later. It was a cold day.

I am not sure why the police officer didn’t duck into the bunker right in front of us, but after coming to a halt in front of it when he did halfway past it, we all very briefly looked back at the truck or in the direction of the explosion and then made our way into the bunker.

Now, calling this a bunker might be glorifying it a bit. It was some cement blocks stacked on top of each other in a hollow square. With some pretty big gaps all over the place. Square gaps like a third of meter (at least a foot) wide. More and more people came out of the woodwork and crammed inside. Almost literally came out of the woodwork, as we were surrounded by a small patch of woods. I was surprised at how many people were hanging out there. It was a mix of both police and soldiers, and although I called them military police, I think they were just regular Territorial Defense soldiers detailed to help man the checkpoint, but there were more than a dozen of us between our medical team and them, and ours was only vehicle halted at the checkpoint.

Everyone started nervously eyeing the big gaps in the sides of the bunker and the flimsy homemade wooden door, imagining shrapnel flying through those gaps into us. Especially after another drone exploded nearby. Shortly after that was when one of the Ukrainians said something that I intuitively managed to interpret as “Why don’t we all run over to the much better bunker across the street”, and I said, “If you have a much better bunker right nearby, by all means let’s go there”! And we did.

Well, it was better if you aren’t claustrophobic. Like I am. I do pretty good up until I am crammed into a space so tight I can’t move my arms. Then I get some anxiety going, and it is hard for me to keep it under control, it feels like the anxiety constantly builds the longer I spend in confines about that close. It was one of my biggest concerns about joining the army, being crammed into tight underground spaces, with people between me and the exit, and only one exit at that. Only one bunker have I ever been in had a second exit. That was the excellent bunker our unit constructed at the second location we were at in Serebryanskyy Forest. We didn’t get to stay in it long before we were moved to the Chasiv Yar front, and I hope whoever was last in it chucked a thermite grenade in there before the Russians moved in.

So, we zig-zag down the proper trench leading to the bunkers entrance, and I am the last one in. Which I am very thankful for. Because, in reality, it is like a tight three-man office bunker. Not a dozen plus man bomb shelter. So, it’s standing room only, and it’s pretty tight. I am thinking to myself, if anyone else tries to come in here, I am giving them my spot, and I am going to crouch in the trench just outside. Because I can just deal with this for a little while, since I am standing right up against the door, and so I know I can step out at any time, but if someone crowds in behind me, trapping me, and things get that much tighter, well, I don’t know how long I can deal with that, and honestly, I’ll take the risk of the damned drone from the safety of the deep zig-zag trench over standing in here for who knows how long in the sardine can bunker waiting for the next one to hit.

Oleksii is kind of our Starlink guru. True to form, as soon as we are in the bunker, he is asking if they’ve got one and getting the password from them. Because there’s no cel service here. We knew that already. He immediately updates our unit that we got hit, and we are going to need yet another windshield. Our second lost windshield in 3 days. In fact, I just picked up this truck from our mechanics about 10 days ago, when they finished installing a new windshield, replacing the one the big KAB bomb wrecked. This time. This is the same Toyota that had its windshield and side windows blown out by a KAB at our stabilization point when we were on the Prokrovsk front. And this same truck is the one that got three 30mm VOG grenades dropped on it by drones in the Serebryanksyy Forest. It’s latest windshield (its third) still had tape on it. When I picked it up from our mechanics, I didn’t know if I was supposed to leave it on for a bit for some glue to cure or something, and no one else pulled it off in the whole week and half we had it before that windshield too got blown up. There’s more than one reason I put an armored windshield into mine. When we got this latest one installed in the benzene Toyota we were told we got the last Toyota 70 series windshield in the country. Luckily, it won't be our problem to replace these, as the army is taking all of our vehicles (except mine) as part of disbanding the Legion. The handover of our vehicles is supposed to happen in 8 more days. Meanwhile, we fight on.

After maybe ten minutes inside the sardine can, and no more explosions, the guy next to me wants to go out. I kind of have to step outside to let him out, as I am standing right in front of the door. That’s fine by me, I figure I’ll walk out and see if my team follows. They do, and Oleksii and I peek over the lip of the trench as we proceed through it as it gets shallower so we can do so. Truck ain’t on fire, tires aren’t flat, let’s see if we can get the hell out of here!

He tells me to grab the truck and meet him and our doc down the road to the south and we split up. I figure they’ll see me rolling up on them and come running out of the woods to me, so I don’t bother to clarify where, I just take off in a sprint for the truck, with cops and soldiers appearing out of the woods and around the bunker we were first in to shout something at me.

I zip back through the intersection and start going down the road, and sure enough, here come my guys running out of the woods. I half pull off the road over to them, and as Oleksii starts to climb in, I ask him if we are continuing south, as the original plan this morning had been to drive west over the bridge at Staryi Saltiv. As he jumps in, he says, yes, KAB’s have been reported inbound! We might not have a bridge to go over! Left unspoken is that we might well be crossing over the bridge when those huge bombs hit. A few minutes later we get another heads up.

Staryi Saltiv isn’t electing a new pope.

Our drive home was long, having to detour far to the south, past yet another blown bridge, but it was uneventful, except for my losing cel service after dropping the doc and medic off and taking a wrong turn into a neighborhood I wasn’t familiar with in Kharkiv. I have learned a good chunk of the city, but it is still a big city, 1.5 million people before the war. With no GPS and no internet connection, I had to drive a long ways to bump into the Lopan River and find a landmark I could use to get me to my route finally home. It was a frustrating end to a day I just wanted to be over.

I am pretty sure that the drone not only came in too fast, but his angle of approach wasn’t optimal for hitting us, especially with the complication of the drone netting extending just past us, causing it not only slam into the ground just short of hitting us, but also at a crosswise angle, which sent most of its shrapnel past the front of our truck and off the road to the right of us, where, unfortunately, a dog was. It was pretty badly wounded, but slipped away in the early chaos, so we didn’t end up tending to it.

(Another image not mine, Oleksii took this one.)

We were lucky that the drone had a comparatively weak warhead. At least two pieces of shrapnel struck the windshield, another piece of shrapnel punctured the clear plastic of one of the headlight housings but didn’t knock out the light or turn signal. Three pieces of shrapnel hit in the center front, two gouging the grille, the other impacting the radiator, but not penetrating it. Perhaps that one actually spent most of its energy gouging the grille. Two more pieces of shrapnel hit the edge of the roof, removing some paint and making minor dents there. All the starring on the windshield I think was just from the shock wave of the blast.

At first, I thought we were going to have flat tires on the driver’s side, because I felt the vehicle settle in that direction in the moment before I bailed out, but when I came back to the truck the tires were still fine, and again when we checked everything a ways down the road. I now think the shock wave from the blast was enough to rock the truck a little on its springs in the direction away from the blast, and I didn’t notice that, but I did notice it settling back down to the left, but initially misinterpreted it.

That’s it. Again, very thankful it was a relatively weak warhead, and wasn’t slightly more skilfully aimed. For even as weak as it was, it would have been very bad news for us if it had impacted the windshield. We’d all probably be blind and very badly concussed with traumatic brain injuries, if not dead.

I am also thankful that Oleksii immediately got on comms when we got a chance and that the info that KAB’s were in the air and inbound to us was pushed down to us units so he knew that and could guide us away from the big incoming bombs that hit the bridge right about the moment we would have been driving over it if we hadn’t changed directions.

“Missed me bitch!”

I had hoped to have a second piece of writing up today but have run out of time. I hope to get that done tomorrow. That one will have updates from how the war is going generally. Ukraine has scored some impressive victories you may not have heard about with all the useless chatter about a peace treaty that is never going to happen, and Russian lies about having taken four Ukrainian cities that they have not. More on all that and more, tomorrow.

Be good to each other.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down,

And merry christmas/solstice/Channukah/Festivus etc, whatever your preference is for the winter holiday.

May goodness prevail.

Spoiler: the world will never have peace. Ukraine might, but war is coming.

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