“I nearly escaped the jaws of death a few days ago when a Shahed landed near my apartment,” a friend from Kyiv texted me, barely two weeks after I left the city. Her message was not unusual. In today’s Ukraine, people have learned to identify the threat not by sight, but by sound. They know the whirring of a reconnaissance quadcopter, the low growl of a Russian Orlan-10, or the menacing chainsaw-like buzz of the Iranian-origin Shahed kamikaze drone.

The sky tells its own story every night and Ukrainians have learned to read it for survival.

Almost four-years into the full-scale invasion by Russia, one unmistakable transformation defines this war: its high-tech, drone-driven nature. To use a cliché; it was described as the weapon of David in the battle between David vs Goliath.

Drones

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