I joined the army on the day of the Russian invasion. I’d studied computer science and only recently landed a great internship at a game company. But I saw the news and knew my options were to sit and wait for them to come and kill me or go running into the fight.

Comparing the early days of the war to now, it’s like two different worlds. Back then there were drones, but most of the damage was still done by artillery. Now, drones are everywhere, from the front line all the way back 30 kilometres. It’s terrifying because you used to be able to come a little way back from the fighting for rest and feel completely safe. Now, danger is always looming over you, wherever you are.

I occasionally have the chance to get back to Kyiv and then I feel like I’m not losing my mind quite as fast as usual. It’s a partial respite because on the front line we work 24 hours a day and the non-stop fighting is hugely draining, but you’re still aware of the risk of drone strikes even in Kyiv. You just can’t escape it. 

On the front line, we spend 90 per cent of our time underground in bunkers because of the threat of enemy drones. Every time you go outside, you risk being spotted and killed. The conditions are like camping, but it obviously has a very different vibe.

I’ve done a lot of different jobs as a drone pilot, but at the end of the day, the mission was always to protect our ground troops. I spent time as a reconnaissance drone pilot, then flying bomber drones and now I’m doing anti-drone missions in a regiment called Aquila under the control of the 3rd Army Corps.

We specialise in shooting down everything from small first-person view (FPV) drones to the long-range kamikaze models heading for Ukraine’s cities. We’ve got short-range anti-aircraft guns, shoulder-launched rockets and drones. But I’m in a small unit that does drone-to-drone warfare in the skies above the front line.

I’m proud to say that I’m a top performer not just in my regiment but in the wider army. I think it’s because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but I’ve taken out 932 enemy drones. Right now I focus on finding smaller FPV drones that are doing reconnaissance or hunting our troops with explosives, and take them out before they can do any damage.

Russians often find our positions on the front line and target them with drones and artillery. We get information from our guys that they’re being hunted and we try to take out Russian drones before they can do any damage. Most of the time we find them.

I remember one time we were retaking a village that the Russians had occupied. In a single day, we erased all the progress they’d made in a year, and we drone pilots were helping cover the guys that were advancing on the ground. There was a soldier wounded, and the Russians were trying to bomb him with a drone. At the last minute, we found it, we hit it and the guy is alive because of that. It’s an amazing feeling. 

Spotting those tiny drones among miles of open land is as much an art as a science. You need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the enemy pilot who’s out hunting for your comrades, imagine what interests them, where they’ll be looking. You need to hunt him.

We have a few distinct jobs in my team. Some assemble and arm drones, others pilot them and there are also navigators who direct us to the enemy and keep meticulous logs of what hardware we get through and which targets we take out. Even though we have specialities, we make sure we can all step into any role in case someone is injured.

On my most recent trip to the front line, we hit 180 targets in 20 days. But there are also missions where you don’t spot a target, run low on battery and have to return, so it can be up to 30 flights per day.

We’ve all seen the advanced interceptors and various other drones that Ukraine produces, and they are used for all sorts of missions, but most of the drones that I fly, and also that I shoot down, are commercially available models. They’re cheap and they’re available – they’re good enough for war. Both we and the Russians buy the same Chinese models – that’s the world that we live in. I’ve shot down so many of them and they still keep coming. 

We work in what used to be beautiful countryside, beautiful cities, that real people lived in. That people had made their own. Now it’s all destroyed. But you can still see so much potential for this land to bring so much happiness and fulfilment to people. It’s disheartening, and heartbreaking, to be perfectly honest.

The war is horrible, it’s horrid, it’s everything that you imagine it being, but it’s also a very unique experience. It’s the sort of experience that foreigners usually only see in movies. The stakes are so high that everything you do matters. Everything you do has a weight to it. It changes your perspective, and you see so many people die and get injured that you begin to realise that every moment that you’re alive, every person that you meet, everything that you do, is important. You could die at any moment. Every moment that you live is important. We don’t get to choose what happens to us, we just get to choose what we do with that.

I used to be much more angry with the Russians, I think. I used to be much more emotional about it. I’m getting to a point now where I’m trying to find my inner peace.

Killing the enemy, from some points of view, it’s horrible. But if you don’t take care of them, if you don’t kill them, they advance towards our troops and then they have to deal with them, and that’s not fair. 

I’m not sure what I’m going to do after the war. It’s a very demanding job, both physically and psychologically, and it takes much from you. When the war ends, yes, you’ll get this freedom, but what to do with this freedom is not a question you get to ponder while you’re still serving. I’ll find some way to keep myself busy.

As told to Matthew Sparkes