DUDCHANY, Ukraine—The three Ukrainian refugees couldn’t see the drone, but they knew it was near. Somewhere up above them, its rotors were buzzing like a swarm of angry bees. “Is it ours?” a soldier in Ukraine’s National Guard radioed to his comrades.
Seconds later, he ushered the three men to hide under the scant cover of a tree in the village of Dudchany. The drone was at most 500 meters away. No one spoke. After months of bombardment, the villagers from the settlement of Khakharovka knew that where drones flew, artillery strikes could well follow.
The whirr of the blades subsided, and the group relaxed, edging out of the tree cover on a recent cloudy day in southern Ukraine. Although it was still unclear whose drone it was, they had just had one more brush with the danger brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Source: Mad Dash to Flee Village Swarming With Putin’s Drunken Troops
