THE WASHINGTON POST: Netting, drone detectors and shotguns are all part of survival in eastern Ukraine

DONETSK REGION, Ukraine

Two foresters entered the woods on a recent morning with chainsaws and marking ribbons — those were for the trees — and two new tools: a handheld box bristling with antennae, like a futuristic transistor radio, and a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun.

Those were for the drones.

“There’s one now,” Volodymyr Cherkasov, 41, said as soon as he switched on his Dzyga drone detector.

It sounded an alert meaning that an FPV — first person view — drone was active within four kilometres, one of dozens a day launched from Russian-held territory nearby.

Mr Cherkasov, and his partner Volodymyr Matsui, 53, started work anyway, counting on the detector to buy time to hide from an attack drone, or to blast it in midair. Both have occurred recently in this war-torn region, where anything that moves is a potential target from above.

Such is daily life in eastern Ukraine, where foresters, bus drivers, farmers and commuters live in fear of Russian drones, now the main cause of civilian casualties near the front, where more than 800 were killed or wounded each month in July and August, UN monitors said in their latest reports.

A Washington Post reporting team, carrying its own detectors for the first time, travelled 150 miles from Kharkiv into the Donetsk region to document how civilians are adapting to survive.

Residents of eastern Ukraine live largely in a spider’s world, with roads and sidewalks and gas stations draped in netting meant to entangle drones. Machine guns mounted on old sedans and pickups are used to shoot them down.

Some civilians carry shotguns to hunt the drones like grouse. A few troops and work crews even have pistol grip “net guns,” popular with wildlife biologists and animal control officers, to launch an expanding web, Spidey-style, at the last second.

Drivers now routinely skip seat belts and leave car doors unlocked to bail out faster. Some travel only in rain or fog, when drones may be grounded or blind.

And those who can afford them are buying the newly developed drone detectors, which have spread among civilians this year as prices fell and the main military model went on sale to the public in August.

One mother went viral when she posted a video of her father’s detector mounted on the handle of her baby stroller.

Reviews are mixed.

Some users find the detectors unreliable or confusing, a nonstop bleeping anxiety generator. Others credit them with saving lives, or at least calming nerves.

“With this, at least you have some idea what the situation is,” Mr Matsui said as he and Mr Cherkasov went into the trees.

The situation wasn’t good. Their detector flashed warnings. Machine gun fire echoed as someone nearby unloaded at a flying threat.

Drones were on the hunt.

Kharkiv to Shevchenkove

The Washington Post team — a photographer, driver, two reporters and a security adviser — set out in two vehicles from Kharkiv, a city of 1.4 million and Ukraine’s second-largest city, which is less than 20 miles from the Russian border.

Missiles and glide bombs target Kharkiv’s taller buildings, so the team stayed underground — in a hotel converted from a basement striptease club.

The city is crowded with refugees from frontline villages. But many still travel back to see relatives or tend to vegetable gardens, and there is daily traffic on the roads to the front.

At the central bus station, drivers describe the routes as gauntlets of tire-shredding debris, dropped explosives and speeding vehicles.

“Everyone is on edge,” said Volodymyr, 61, as passengers boarded his 15-seat Mercedes van bound for Sloviansk, a hot spot for drone attacks.

Like others, Volodymyr spoke on condition that he be identified only by first name because of potential safety risks. He has dodged several low-flying drones, and one dropped an explosive that blew open his roof ventilation hatches earlier this year.

Volodymyr and other drivers now carry detectors, which are hard to monitor without a companion. The devices work by intercepting the video feed an FPV drone sends back to its operator. When your own bus, tractor or house looms on screen, it’s time to hit the gas, bail and run or brace for impact.

Volodymyr prefers to floor it. “If you stop they will burn you right away every time,” he said.

Passengers increasingly carry their own detectors — a mixed blessing, said driver Oleksandr, 27, because they panic even when drones are far off. Still, when they shout “drone!,” he jams the accelerator “with both feet,” and said he has topped 93 miles per hour (154km/h) on war-ravaged roads.

It was about 50 miles south-east, in Shevchenkove, that The Post team’s own Chuika went off the first time: a warning beep, static, then an eerie colour view of the surrounding countryside between two drone propellers spinning at the frame’s edge.

The team pulled onto the grounds of a semi-destroyed village hospital. Some of the two dozen civilian paramedics who still use part of it as a base urged the journalists inside. A medic’s drone detector was also alerting. Gunfire erupted.

Then, an explosion nearby — the improbable all-clear for everyone to go back outside.

“They work mostly as a sedative for us,” Olena, the chief paramedic, said of her crew’s five detectors.

“You can’t stop the drone, but at least you can see where it is flying.”

After months of runs to 30 mostly empty villages, where the few residents left are too old or poor to leave, the medics can recognise at a glance whatever patch of countryside appears in the intercepted footage.

They also know they are targets. Earlier this year, a drone killed a doctor and a driver in a clearly marked ambulance.

“The detectors help, but the jammers are more important,” Olena said, pointing to the antennae on the ambulance roofs, including a former Brink’s truck used for runs closest to the front.

Electronic warfare jammers flood the airwaves with radio noise, severing the link between a drone and its pilot. They are powerless against Russia’s increasing use of fiber-optic drones, which don’t rely on a broadcast signal. But they play havoc with radio-controlled aircraft.

“I’m alive because of those,” Olena said.

Earlier this year, a drone that had landed and was waiting by the roadside flew up at the approach of Olena’s ambulance. It headed for her windshield, but with its signal jammed it veered and exploded beside the vehicle.

The ambulance still bears the scars, and so does Olena — she took a fragment in the shin.

Shevchenkove to Izyum

The nets get thicker south of Shevchenkove.

Crews work fast, sinking poles and weaving mesh into gossamer channels that snake endlessly across the steppes of eastern Ukraine. The teams cover about 130 miles or more of roadway a month, more than 1,250 miles so far, the Defence Ministry says.

Gas stations, frequent targets, are draped, too. The mesh catches more than drones: fallen leaves pile on top, and outside Izyum an entangled owl hung dead, not far from the pine forest where 447 civilians were found buried in mass graves after Russia’s six-month occupation in 2022.

In the centre of Izyum, nets cover every street, most sidewalks and many shops. When Russian troops filled the town, residents lived in basements. Now the front is fewer than 20 miles away again. Strikes are daily, and people move under a mesh shroud.

Serhii, 52, sat in a rare patch of open sky, a park by the church. An environmental researcher, he and a carload of colleagues drive the region collecting samples to track the war’s toll on the land.

Their boss bought them a drone detector. It beeps often, Kurmas said, but they find it more confusing than comforting. They can never tell if a drone is Russian or Ukrainian — whether to shoot or run. For now, they keep it in the glove box.

“We just don’t really have the skills yet to work with it properly,” Kurmas said.

The next morning, after two strikes cut power in Izyum, pizza-restaurant workers wrangled a generator into place a few yards from their door. One ducked through a hole in the nets to take out the trash.

They stay open through attacks and blackouts, they said, to keep life feeling normal but mostly to earn money. They laughed at the notion of a $700 drone detector.

“People in this neighbourhood can’t afford anything like that,” one said.

Izyum to Cherkaske

South of Izyum, sunflower fields too big to cover with netting unroll on both sides of the road, waiting for harvesters who have to work under fire. Drones have hit several combines. In some fields, FPVs hover above and Russian land mines lurk below.

The Post team approached several farmers; all were reluctant to talk. Several cited a combine operator killed by a drone shortly after speaking to reporters. Another recent strike killed six workers in a vegetable-sorting shed, they said.

Some agricultural workers won’t enter the fields without a shotgun and a detector, said a farm manager who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Nobody wants to talk about it,” he said.

A few miles into the fiercely contested Donetsk region was the patch of woodland where the two foresters moved carefully, accompanied by the drone detector they bought with their own money.

Three Ukrainian tanks rattled along the adjacent road. Russians target the woods, assuming they hide military positions, Mr Cherkasov, one of the foresters, said.

The war has remade their work. Missile and drone strikes start fires. Shrapnel damages more trees than insects once did. They find mines and shells constantly. The job gets harder as the autumn leaves fall.

“Watch where you walk,” Mr Matsui said.

They’ve shot down one drone, a quadcopter that was approaching a firefighting crew. It was a good shot, Mr Cherkasov acknowledged, but skeet shooting an attack drone from the sky is not what they are trained for, or what they want to be doing.

More and more, they said, the drones are defeating any protections civilians can muster. They are shrinking their world. The foresters said they only rarely travel even the 10 miles to Slovyansk, the closest concentration of shops and health care.

“It’s really just Russian roulette out there now,” Mr Matsui said.