They escaped the fronts of Ukraine. The sound of the drones followed them

In a cramped apartment in the Ukrainian capital, kyiv, Pavlo, a 30 -year -old drone operator who had recently returned from the front, slipped a black box on the size of a pizza box. Inside, there was a four rotor drone which he intended to fly in the room.

He pressed the buttons of the control unit and pressed the antenna to different positions. Nothing happened. “Sorry, not today,” he said with a smile. The unit looked good, but something was broken.

At the front, Pavlo, who asked to be identified only by his first name, was a first -person drone pilot (FPV). These highly maneuverable little drones have front cameras that allow them to be controlled remotely. During the last year, the FPV loaded with bombs have become omnipresent on the front lines in Ukraine, replacing the heavy weapons which characterized the first phase of the war.

The FPVs hunt armored vehicles, hunt infantry units through trees and track down individual soldiers at their death. “You can’t hide at the FPV, and running is useless,” said Pavlo. “You try to be as calm as possible, and you pray.”

Even when an FPV is too high to see clearly or hidden behind the foliage, soldiers can hear its distinctive and acute groan.

“Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz,” said Pavlo. “You are hunted.”

After more than a year at the front, Pavlo returned home to the kyiv apartment which he shares with his wife. But the sound of the drones followed him. Daily mechanical tools such as lawn mowers, motorcycles and air conditioners remind him of the FPV that chased him as well as his unitary comrades.

And nature is not an escape. Pavlo can no longer hear the sound of bees and flies bursting near him without a creeping panic. “I no longer like to enter nature and hear this sound, because it reminds me of drones so hard,” he said.

The trauma associated with the sound is not new – generations of soldiers have been affected by sudden noises after returning to civil life. But as the war in Ukraine has become a conflict motivated by drone technology, trauma has evolved with it.

“In the past year, the majority of patients – if they are not physically injured – have mental health injuries due to drone activity,” said Dr. Serhii Andrichenko, chief psychiatrist of Kiev military hospital. “We call this droneophobia.”

Several thousand men are now coming forward like Pavlo, with acute stress disorders associated with drone sounds, Dr. Andrichenko said. Droneophobia can be triggered by a range of ordinary urban sounds – small motorcycles and scooters, lawn mowers, air conditioners – everything that is mechanical than whirlwinds.

“If it is a moped or a lawn mower, my first thought is that it could be a drone,” said another front line soldier, Savur, who lost his arm during an FPV drone attack.

On the front line, drones were a “permanent sound,” said Savur, who, in accordance with the military protocol, asked to be identified by his indicative. “The sound of a shell only lasts a few seconds, but the sound of the drone is there most of the time,” he said.

“You can lie down in your position, in your fox hole, and listen to it for hours. I remember all the time.”

Or sometimes the problem was the opposite – silence. “Silence is still the start,” said Dr. Andrichenko, the psychiatrist. “When the soldiers rotate to fight against positions, they start to listen carefully to ensure that there are no drones. There is constant tension, a constant fear. They are always looking for their eyes.”

In many cases, this constant feeling of tension was not dissipated by the return to civilian life. Soldiers were suddenly observed extinguishing the lights at home, moving away from the windows and hiding under the furniture.

Later, if a soldier is seen for a treatment, Dr. Andrichenko describes how he often has no memory of any trigger, but his wife or his family member will reveal that an extractor fan or an air conditioner had just been on.

Soldiers from the previous phases of the war – which are more characterized by brutal and direct fights – returned to the house fearing to be in the forests, where a large part of the fights had taken place. But Drone Warfare reversed the phenomenon. From now on, the soldiers “feel the safest in the forests, under dense trees,” said the psychiatrist. “And during their free time, they try to avoid wooded areas.”

The increase in the use of drones had another terrorizing effect for combat troops – it extended the danger area far from the front line. The soldiers operating up to 40 km (25 miles) from a distance or backwards after a heavy rotation, can no longer lower the guard.

Nazar Bokhii, commander of a small drone unit, was approximately 5 km from the contact line in a canoe one day when his unit marked a direct hit on a Russian mortar position at 22 km. Supported by success, Bokhii has been delimited outside the canoe, forgetting the usual protocol to stop first to listen to such a buzz.

Meters from there, a Russian FPV dragged into the air. As he went to him, Bokhii had only time to raise his arms. When he exploded, he took his two hands and his left eye and burned his face seriously.

The Bokhii SSPT was limited, he said, an occasional fear response to motorcycles and lawns. But he knew the effect of sound, he said, because his unit had used him to inflict terror on others.

“We were the team that caused fear with sound, not the side that suffered,” said Bokhii.

They had at some point realized that the sound could be used to force the Russian soldiers in exposed areas. “You are buzzing around them and it becomes a test of the psychological resilience of the enemy,” said Bokhii. “The sound of the drone itself is a serious psychological attack.”

According to Bokhii, buzz over a soldier long enough and he will leave a strong refuge and simply come up against an open ground. “Our psychology works in such a way that we have to do something to calm down,” said Bokhii. “So you hover nearby and delete it psychologically … and it starts to run and becomes easier to strike.”

And the psychological terror of the FPV is no longer just a problem on the front line. He has reached even beyond the areas behind the front lines. Russia has started using FPVs to abandon ammunition on civilians in nearby Ukrainian cities.

Among the worst shots, there is Kherson, a southern city occupied for a while by Russian forces and always comfortably in the drone chain. According to Human Rights Watch, Russian forces have deliberately targeted civilians in the city with FPV drones and killed them or mutilated – a war crime.

According to the regional military administration, at least 84 civilians were killed in the Kherson region following Russian drone attacks this year.

Residents say that the tiny FPV are daily terror.

“There is no longer a safe place,” said Dmytro Olifirenko, a 23-year-old border guard who lives in Kherson City. “You must always be alert, concentrated and because of this, the body is constantly under stress,” he said.

Olifirenko was waiting for a bus stop in September when he heard the familiar sound of a Russian drone over his head. “We thought it would follow the bus because they driven civilian buses,” he said.

Instead, the drone simply dropped its ammunition on the bus stop, sending bursts of buses in the head, face and leg of Olifirenko. A video of the incident, filmed by a passer -by, captured the drone buzz followed by the cries of Olifirenko as he was bleeding on the sidewalk.

Olifirenko has now heard drones “constantly”, he said, whether or not they are there. “It hits your mental and psychological health hard,” he said. “Even when you leave for Mykolav or another city, you are constantly trying to listen.”

For civilians like Oliferenko, drones have transformed ordinary sounds of a populated area – cars, motorcycles, generators, lawn, air conditioners – into a psychological glove so that civilians run every day, even if they claim the real danger of the drones themselves.

For soldiers who come back forward, like Pavlo, drones have created a new type of specific fear, which is not easy to shake.

“You see the world as a battlefield,” said Pavlo. “It can become a battlefield any second.”

And all the triggers, hearing – the drones of the human meaning exploit so effectively – was the most insidious, he said.

“When you see something, your brain can check it in a second, you can do what it is very fast.

“But an unknown sound is different. Your brain has been changed. You cannot ignore it, you have to answer. Because in the first line, it could save your life.”

Svitlana Libet contributed to this report. Photographs by Joel Gunter.