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

Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare.

The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled “Terminator” drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. Russian soldiers were killed.

“We tried it,” says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].”

The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage “Terminator mode”, in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets.

“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

With no way to tell what the automated drones had seen or targeted, human-piloted drones were sent into the area after the test to manually check results. Victims included “a couple of soldiers, one truck”, says Kokhanovskyy. While there is no recording of the automated drones attacking these targets, it was concluded that the drones had killed them.

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Kokhanovskyy says that he was not at the test personally but that it was carried out by an unnamed military unit near the cities of Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar as part of a Ukrainian counteroffensive push. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence did not respond to questions about the test or the current legal position on the use of fully autonomous weapons.

The use of AI is common in militaries around the world, helping to pick targets among overwhelming piles of intelligence data and automating certain functions of weapons, but humans are always in the loop at some point. Kokhanovskyy’s admission is the most categorical evidence yet that a death has occurred in battle solely at the hands of AI.

The Ukrainian government currently bans the use of AI at the final stage of intercepting targets, according to defence company sources speaking at the embassy press conference, although AI is used for many parts of the process by many devices up to that point. Kokhanovskyy says that the government is aware of the growing capabilities of AI and that it is in talks with defence companies about whether or not rules should be made more lenient.

Reports in 2023 suggested that Ukrainian attack drones equipped with artificial intelligence were finding and attacking targets without human assistance – but were being deployed against vehicles such as tanks, rather than infantry. At the time, no human casualties were confirmed.

While there is no official international ban on autonomous weapons that can kill without human intervention, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called for one, saying that “there is no place for lethal autonomous weapon systems in our world”.

The UN has said that there are concerns that such weapons could violate international humanitarian and human rights laws by removing human judgement from warfare. There is also a risk that autonomous systems could make mistakes, either attacking soldiers or equipment from the same side or striking civilians.

Most militaries are developing devices that automate at least some part of the process of attacking targets. The US has software that accumulates and analyses vast amounts of disparate data and selects targets on the battlefield that can then be struck by drones, but, in theory, this requires human confirmation. There have been claims that the US is also developing so-called Goalkeeper flying drones and Whiplash naval drones, which are capable of finding their own targets and taking them out.

A UN report from 2021 even suggested that a Kargu-2 quadcopter produced by a Turkish firm may have been used to autonomously attack humans the previous year. The gave no specific detail on the source of the claims or whether any humans had been injured or killed, but suggested that Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA) had used the drones against retreating Haftar forces.

Major Danylo Polozhukhno, a senior figure in Ukraine’s 21st Separate Unmanned Systems Regiment of the 3rd Army Corps who was not aware of or involved with the test, told New Scientist that his soldiers use semi-autonomous control systems but that there is always a human in the loop.

“These drone systems and platforms are capable of automatically acquiring and tracking targets, as well as autonomously guiding themselves during the final metres of the approach, which helps simplify the operators’ work. However, we do not use fully autonomous drone systems that independently select and engage targets without any operator involvement,” says Polozhukhno. “Ukraine adheres to international humanitarian law and takes seriously its responsibility to uphold the rights of all combatants. It also exercises great care in decision-making in order to prevent civilian casualties.”

at the University of Oxford says killing with AI steals the dignity of the soldier, removes responsibility from the attacker and must be banned. “It’s not just problematic, it’s horrendous,” she says. “Do we want to be the society who kills other people, who allows their government to kill other people, without humans being involved?”

at the University of Exeter, UK, says that though fully autonomous attacks without humans in the loop are technologically possible, they may be less of a decisive tool than many think.

“It is certainly possible governments would allow this if it gave them any military advantage,” he says. “However, the fact remains that very few if any of the millions of drones which have been used in the Ukrainian war by Russian and Ukrainian forces have been [fully] autonomous.”

“So it’s not just that it’s ethically right to keep humans in the loop, at this point, it’s more militarily effective,” says King.

Kokhanovskyy says that the Terminator project has not progressed since the test because of Ukraine’s rules. He is now CEO of drone-maker Aero Center, which he says was not involved in the test as it had not been created at the time, a Ukranian firm working on autonomous interceptor drones. These are designed to target incoming Russian Shahed kamikaze drones and take them out before they can reach towns and cities full of civilians or important infrastructure.

The company’s ALITA system will consist of 16 launch pads, equipped with 64 drones. It will be ready by October and capable of watching for incoming drones, automatically launching and travelling towards the target at 450 kilometres per hour before taking out everything from small drones to helicopters.

But Ukraine’s current rules will forbid fully autonomous operation and demand humans verify targets in the final stages of interception. Even in that mode, the entire battery of 64 drones will require just two human operators, meaning it will dramatically reduce personnel.

“Every step of this one can be either manual or automatic. We’re not allowed to do the final stage automatically,” says Kokhanovskyy, who believes that the rules should change. “I would love to,” he says.

A large forest fire is spreading through the Chernobyl exclusion zone after a drone struck the area yesterday. Though the fire is serious, those on the ground say the risk of radioactive contamination outside the area is minimal.

The Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve (CREBR) wrote in a that around 12 square kilometres of land, located to the south-east of the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl and the nuclear plant’s former cooling ponds, are burning due to a drone crash – but didn’t give details on the type or origin of the device. As of Friday afternoon, some 331 people and 75 pieces of equipment are involved in the emergency response.

“It’s really big. Guys who are working on [the] fire line are breathing air with high concentration of radionuclides,” says Denys Vyshnevskiy at the CREBR. “After the shift, they check concentration radionuclides in the body.”

Vyshnevskiy says that 5 to 10 kilometres from the fire, the radiation levels are normal, and there is little risk of contamination outside the exclusion zone.

Other estimates using satellite images seen by New Scientist suggest that the area of the fire has actually grown to 24.4 square kilometres.

Exclusive report: Inside Chernobyl, 40 years after nuclear disaster

New Scientist reporter Matthew Sparkes secured unrivalled access to Chernobyl's most crucial scientific sites, where researchers are fighting to protect the area and ensure it remains safe amid the constant threat of attack from Russia

at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Kyiv, Ukraine, was near the site when the fire started, but saw only smoke because the affected area was closed to scientists at the time by the military. She also thinks there is very little risk of radioactive contamination outside the zone.

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The State Emergency Service of Ukraine (SES) said in a Telegram post that tackling the fire is . “The fire is rapidly spreading across the territory,” it wrote. Vyshnevskiy says the hope on the ground is that rain expected this evening will aid firefighters.

The SES said that some areas are too dangerous for firefighters to access because of land mines, so are being left temporarily while efforts are concentrated elsewhere.

The man who crawls into the perilous heart of the Chernobyl reactor

Ever since the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in 1986, scientists have needed to monitor radioactive conditions inside. That job currently falls to Anatoly Doroshenko, who explains the dangers and importance of his work to New Scientist

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is frequently overflown by Russian drones en route to Kyiv and other targets within Ukraine. Last year, a Russian drone struck the New Safe Confinement shelter, which protects the highly radioactive remains of the 1986 disaster, blasting a hole all the way through its multi-layer construction.

Footage from that night shows fire and smoke billowing from a gaping hole – luckily, it was far enough towards the edge of the building that debris didn’t fall onto the fragile reactor or sarcophagus below, which could have caused collapse and stirred up dangerously radioactive material.

An electrical outage at Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant has taken spent fuel cooling systems offline, leading to a potential risk of overheating and the release of dangerous levels of radiation – but due to the age of the fuel, it should be safe until power is restored.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports that several Ukrainian electrical substations have been hit by Russian military strikes, causing power outages at Chernobyl. “The IAEA is actively following developments in order to assess impact on nuclear safety,” wrote IAEA director general Rafael Grossi .

Spent nuclear fuel from reactors continues to emit radiation for years, creating heat that must be shed, or else the fuel can melt and emit a spike of dangerous radiation. The fuel from Chernobyl’s former reactors is stored in a large cooling pond that is constantly replenished with fresh, cold water to keep its temperature down.

But without an electricity supply – which the IAEA says the site now lacks – this cooling has stopped, which will allow the water temperature to rise and increase the rate of evaporation.

“When the fuel comes out of a reactor, it will be hot for a while, because there will be fission products and there will be radioactive and giving off gammas and betas and alphas – just emitting energy, which needs to be removed, otherwise it will eventually melt,” says at the University of Cambridge.

Working in Chernobyl’s favour, however, is that its stored fuel is older and therefore has already had time to emit much of its radioactive energy and cool down. The risk now is lower than the risk was in 2022, for example, when New Scientist reported on similar power outages at Chernobyl.

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“It is always a worry when a nuclear site loses power, but worry about nuclear risks is often several orders of magnitude above the risks associated with other events with similar consequences,” says , also at Cambridge.

Chernobyl’s reactor 4 exploded in 1986, but reactor 2 was shut down in 1991, reactor 1 ceased generating power in 1996 and reactor 3 – the final one at the site – was decommissioned in 2000.

The exact specifications of the storage pools that contain the fuel left over from those reactors at Chernobyl are kept classified, says Cosgrove. But he is aware of an inspection by regulators in 2022, which found that the risk of spent fuel overheating in the case of a power outage was low. “This fuel has been sat in there for 20 years, so it will have decayed. More and more of that energy will be gone,” he says.

Electrical supply to Chernobyl – and indeed much of Ukraine – has been up and down since Russia’s full-scale invasion. But in recent months, Russia has increased its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.

The loss of power at Chernobyl is the latest in a string of Russian actions that have compromised nuclear safety, including occupying Chernobyl for several weeks and disrupting staff from maintaining it properly, taking over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in a similar but long-running manner, and striking the New Safe Confinement building, which covers the ruins of Chernobyl’s reactor 4 disaster, with a drone in February last year.