In a warm bunker, lined with wooden logs, it is Dmytro’s job to monitor and help the drone crews on the frontline. Perhaps a dozen video feeds come through to his screen on an increasingly hot section of the front, running roughly from Pokrovske to Huliaipole, 50 miles east of Zaporizhzhia city.

Dmytro, 33, is with the 423rd drone battalion, a specialist unit only formed in 2024. He cycles through the feeds, on Ukraine’s battlefield Delta system, expanding each in turn. The grainy images come from one-way FPV (first person view) drones; clearer footage, with heights and speed, from commercially bought Mavic drones; at another point there is a bomber drone, available munitions marked in green.

Maksym, 29, and Serhii, 24, have just returned from five days on the front, part of a mixed crew of FPV and Mavic pilots. Now they are resting, one playing a video game, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, a post-apocalyptic shooter set in the exclusion zone surrounding the destroyed nuclear power plant – raising the obvious question of whether there is any similarity to their frontline work.

"It helps us do our job,” Maksym says, smiling. “If you are flying a jet in one of the battlefield games, it’s basically the same as flying a Mavic. It’s good practise.”