The pastry chef, lawyer and fast food boss shooting down Putin’s drones with a WWI-era machine gun mounted on a truck from Leeds

The time is 3.15am and sunrise is still 90 minutes away. A crescent moon has been flitting between the clouds, and every ear is strained for the familiar hateful buzz of the next wave of Russian kamikaze drones. Instead, there comes a sound of unearthly beauty.

The blue, rain-flecked beam of the mobile air defence unit’s searchlight has confused the local skylarks into believing the day is dawning. And so, they begin their premature, heart-lifting chorus, even as sudden death flies in from the north-east.

We are on the edge of a soya-bean field an hour from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

A second-hand Mitsubishi pick-up truck, which began working life in Leeds, West Yorkshire, is parked in a thicket of prickly lettuce. On the flat bed at the back, a heavy machine-gun designed during the First World War is trained at the sky.

The gun crew is commanded by a former sports umpire called Yuri. Other members of his squad include a pastry chef, a vending-machine engineer, a fast-food entrepreneur and a lawyer.

There is something profoundly moving about their dedication and camaraderie. Tomorrow they will return to their day jobs, but tonight they are the embattled capital’s first line of air defence.

All are from the big city, which is under aerial bombardment as never before. What gets past them, they know, is heading for their family homes.

And yet, in this 21st-century war, their main weapons are often inadequate for this life-or-death task – the gun crews are like a small child reaching for a low-hanging apple he cannot quite touch.

In the past fortnight, the world has seen how Israel’s much-vaunted air-defence systems have sometimes struggled to shut out volleys of Iranian missiles and drones. Mass casualties have resulted.

Consider, then, what has happened in the same period in Ukraine, where more civilians have been killed by air attacks than in Israel. Yet while Jerusalem is given what it needs by a supportive Trump administration, Ukraine struggles to make do.

President Volodymyr Zelensky complained in April that Western allies had not provided anything close to the number of state-of-the-art, American-made Patriot missile batteries needed to protect Ukraine’s cities against mass Russian attack. 

These shortages also extend to ammunition. Mr Zelensky recounted a call he got from an air defence commander who said his sole Patriot battery had run out of missiles entirely.

Meanwhile, Russia turns the screw, ramping up urban blitzes to the most intense levels since this war began.

On Tuesday this week, 22 civilians died in a rare daylight air attack on Dnipropetrovsk oblast, 250 miles south of Kyiv.

But the big recent raids have mostly been aimed at Kyiv, and almost always take place at night.

On Sunday night into Monday morning, nine civilians were killed here during another mass bombardment. The previous week, 23 died in one Kyiv apartment building alone during the heaviest blitz of the war, in which Russia launched 472 aerial weapons.

The Russian ministry of defence issued a statement in the hours that followed which said: ‘The objectives of the strikes were achieved. All designated targets were hit.’

Tell that to the bereaved civilians of devastated Solomianskyi district. Ballistic and cruise missiles are the deadliest threats to residents here. But the workhorses of the Russian blitzes are the Geran-2 suicide drones, a Russian development of the Iranian-designed Shahed-136.

These large, delta-winged, piston-engine weapons can carry a warhead of up to 90kg for more than 1,500 miles before plunging into a target. They’re not fast, cruising at around 115mph, fly at relatively low altitudes and are noisy. 

Their distinctive buzzing sound, like a lawn mower or strimmer, has become the nocturnal bane of all urban Ukrainians, just as the Doodlebug was for Britons during the Second World War.

It’s only these drones, among the Russian aerial attack arsenal, that Yuri and his men have any realistic hope of hitting.

This week, Mail cameraman Jamie Wiseman and I spent several nights with the gun crews of Territorial Community Volunteer Formation 24 ‘Left Bank’, to witness the difficulties of their task. 

It’s 9.14pm on a balmy evening and a report has just come through from HQ that the night’s first wave of Geran kamikaze drones has been launched from Russian territory.

Early-warning systems will take a while to determine the direction of their flight – they could be heading for Kyiv, Kharkiv to the east of us, or cities further south.

In an hour, when the drones will still be 124 miles away, the duty truck crews here will leave for their designated firing positions.

We are in a former village hall deep in the countryside, which serves as a base for Kyiv’s mobile defence unit. 

Most of the main room is given over to workshop and storage space, while beyond a partition is a rest and dining area and a control desk at which the developing air raids are monitored on a digital map.

Red symbols represent Russian drones and fast jets, and blue symbols are Ukrainian helicopter gunships and F-16 and MiG-29 interceptors. 

A solitary yellow symbol is our own fixed location. Painfully slowly, the reds move across the screen into Ukraine. When not studying the plots, the soldier at the desk is reading Alan Axelrod’s Winston Churchill, CEO: 25 Lessons For Bold Business Leaders.

Aside from Yuri, they are all part-time soldiers, like our Home Guard, although none of them are more than middle-aged. At least once a week, they knock off work, put on their uniforms and drive into the rural hinterland to serve a 24-hour shift taking on the drones.

None of them knew each other before the invasion. Now three of them have the unit’s badge tattooed on their arms or legs, along with the SAS motto in English, ‘Who Dares Wins’.

Food is supplied by the grateful villagers (the location was briefly occupied by the Russians in 2022), the men’s wives and Rostock, the unit’s day-time pastry chef. Outside, in the twilight, two anti-aircraft-gun trucks are parked beside a field of young maize. 

For now, their weapons remain covered with camouflage netting and tarpaulin. Each vehicle has a .50-calibre machine-gun of a design more than a century old that was once mounted in the Flying Fortress bombers of the Second World War.

Yuri tells me that their guns can engage targets up to an altitude of 7,500ft. Drones have sometimes come over as low as 130ft, when the gunner’s task is like extreme clay-pigeon shooting.

‘First we use our ears and then our eyes,’ says Yuri. ‘Our machine guns are relatively slow-firing, and it might take anything up to 30 rounds to take down a drone. At best, you might see the target for about 20 seconds.’

The most the unit has fired in one night is 150 rounds at three different Geran drones. The battalion has 30 confirmed kills, with more than 100 ‘probables’.

Recently, however, Russian drones have taken to flying at 3,000m or more, which is beyond the unit’s ability to engage.

Yet while the unit cannot hit the drones, their presence has served to push the enemy to an altitude where they can be better seen and dealt with by more sophisticated air-defence systems.

For the moment, the .50 calibre gun – or ‘.50 cal’ – is the best weapon available to the men in the village hall. Every bit of equipment, apart from the guns and ammunition, is supplied by members of the unit and paid for out of their own pockets. Even the £2,500 thermal gun sights, without which they would be firing blind at night.

‘We are defending our homes,’ says Bohdan, the second-in-command, a lawyer by training who runs a rail logistics company. ‘That is important psychologically. The cost is high, but the cause is important. We are our home city’s first line of defence. We are directly protecting our families.’

So far, one member of the unit has been killed, although not by drones. A comrade was blown up by a ‘terrorist’ bomb while manning a checkpoint. Two schoolboys had left the device in a bag next to his vehicle. The female Russian agent who had directed them escaped abroad before she, too, could be arrested.

It’s gone 10pm when there is a report of a second drone wave taking off. The gun-truck crews pack up and leave for their firing points in two remote locations some five miles apart. The hope is that the Russian drones will fly over them on their way to Kyiv.

Out here, the night is still, aside from the bark of a farm dog. Then, at 11.04pm an air-raid siren goes off in a distant village. But it’s a warning of a ballistic-missile attack on Kyiv, which the mobile unit has no hope of stopping.

By 11.32pm it’s clear from the crew’s hand-held digital monitor that the drones in the air are concentrating on Kharkiv. The call comes to return to base, where we spend the rest of the night.

The next night is filled with phantoms, loitering drones and strange creatures. Another squad is on duty, but Yuri is still in charge. At 10pm the message comes through that three drones are approaching, 19 miles away and closing. We race to a different firing point on the edge of a field.

Tonight, the wind is strong and rain is in the air. My hands are cold, yet almost the longest day of the year. Low cloud will make the night darker – and engaging drones harder, encouraging them again to fly at altitude. ‘We will have to rely on our ears,’ Yuri says.

At 10.35pm the monitor shows a ‘target’, as the men call the drones, within six miles. On our right horizon we can see the red light of a low-flying Ukrainian helicopter gunship as it also hunts the incoming drones.

A peculiar krek-krek noise strikes up somewhere close by in the darkness, like a very large frog ratcheting. Then another answers it and they carry on back and forth for the rest of the night.

While the men hunt the skies for Gerans, a pair of corn crakes are broadcasting a mating call that only another corn crake would love. ‘Those birds drive us nuts,’ says Volodymyr, an IT developer. ‘The same horrible sound from sunset to sunrise, but we never see them.’

He adds: ‘It’s funny how this war has made the wildlife tamer. We have deer approaching very close to us on our missions because there has been no hunting for three seasons now.’

At 10.47pm the monitor reports a single target circling our position at a distance of two miles. Yuri says it could be a reconnaissance drone or a Geran that has been affected by the high winds or Ukrainian electronic warfare.

Then the readings draw even closer, but are more confusing. The digital tracking map apparently shows several drones ‘dancing’ in circles, one as close as 800 yards, well within .50 cal range. 

But nothing can be seen or heard by the gun crew. They are probably phantoms, decoys, created by Russian electronic warfare to confuse and tie up the defences.

Midnight approaches and the crew get the news that the helicopters we saw and other defensive flights have knocked down the drones that approached our sector. By 1.40am the second wave appears to be turned towards Poltava to the east.

At 3.30am the order comes to return to base. Coffee and cold dumplings with spinach and cheese await. There is much good-natured ribbing and laughter. Yuri’s seems a happy unit of citizen soldiers.

At the end of their shift they will return to their families in the big city knowing they have been defenders for the past 24 hours.

Daylight arrives at 4.45am and, with it, the more pleasant calls of cuckoos and cockerels. Two deer can be seen in a field beyond the maize. The rota is rearranged because two of the squad must attend their children’s graduations ‘and it only happens once in a lifetime’, Harald explains.

The following night we are in the centre of Kyiv when the Russians launch their latest, thunderous, mass attack on this city. Yuri’s unit are out in the fields, and open fire twice. But, once again, the drones fly too high to be hit.

This one-sided contest will change soon. Any day now, the unit will receive FPV interceptor drones that can fly at 250mph and at an altitude of 13,000ft.

Guided by a pilot, these kamikaze air-defence weapons are designed to ram the Russian Gerans and bring them down.

We watched the gun crews practise with virtual-reality headsets at the village hall. They will keep the venerable .50 cals, but very soon that small child will be tall enough to reach that apple. Kyiv will sleep a little more safely as a result.

 

Additional reporting: Oleksandr Kostiuchenko