UkrainianAna on Drone Warfare, Survival, and Life Facing Russia’s Invasion

This article reflects on an interview and discussion with the volunteer, fundraiser, and true Neskorena, Anastasiya Paraskevova, known publicly as “UkrainianAna”. The conversation explored drone warfare, civilian survival, Ukrainian adaptation, and the psychological reality of living beneath Russia’s invasion. During the interview, air-raid sirens went off; Ana calmly checked her app, judged that the threat was not immediate for her, and later noted that the drone had been shot down. Her account is both a testimony to Ukrainian resilience and a warning that Ukraine is living through the emerging future of war. This warning should be heeded by us all. ^[1]

This week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has once again appealed for more Patriot air-defence support, with Russian ballistic missiles remaining one of the gravest threats to Ukrainian cities. It is an important reminder that, for all of Ukraine’s ingenuity and battlefield adaptation, the country still needs Western help to defend its skies. Drones may now define much of the visible evolution of the war, but ballistic missiles remain a strategic threat Ukraine cannot simply improvise its way out of. ^[2]

Yet the sky above Ukraine is no longer defined only by missiles. Increasingly, it is filled with drones: reconnaissance drones, attack drones, interceptor drones, and the constant fear of machines heard before they are seen. Ukraine’s war in the air now has several layers. There are ballistic missiles, which require systems like Patriot. There are Shaheds and other long-range drones, which terrorise cities. There are small FPV drones that can hunt soldiers and civilians close to the front. This sickening act of hunting civilians, so frequently inflicted by Russian drone pilots, is known as a human safari. However, there are now anti-drone drones, turning the sky itself into a battlefield of war machines. ^[3][4]

This article builds on the previous interview with Dylan Burns. With Ana, the same subject appeared from another angle. If the Dylan Burns interview showed the brutality of drone warfare from a front-line reporting perspective, Ana’s testimony showed how that brutality enters ordinary civilian life. ^[5]

She was not speaking abstractly about military technology. She was describing a world in which sounds trigger reflexes, apps become part of daily threat assessment, and the sky itself has become a contested space. In the middle of the interview, this stopped being theoretical. Air-raid sirens went off. Ana calmly checked her app, explained that the drone was not an immediate threat to her part of the city, and then, a few minutes later, noted that it had been shot down.

This was an apt display of Ukrainian resilience. A refusal to let Russia dictate the terms of ordinary life, and, in Ana’s own spirit, a symbolic middle finger to the aggressor.

That moment captured something difficult to grasp for those of us outside Ukraine: the strange mixture of danger, adaptation, humour, technical competence, and emotional exhaustion that defines life under Russia’s invasion.

How drones became part of everyday war

One of the most striking parts of Ana’s account was the chronology. Drones did not appear all at once as the central feature of the war. Their role morphed over time.

“In 2022 it wasn’t really a thing,” she said. “It wasn’t particularly a thing in 2023,” except that people were buying DJI Mavic drones for soldiers, mostly for scouting. At that stage, drones were still largely a tool of reconnaissance: infantry teams using them to see, scout, and survive.

Then, she said, came the shift. “2024, I think, was the year when it really kicked off,” Ana explained. That was when drones became “proper weaponry,” when they were used constantly, and when the experience of them became “sort of like a daily thing.”

That line matters because it describes the transition from drones as useful equipment to drones as a central architecture of the war. The drone is no longer just an object used by soldiers. It becomes part of the civilian soundscape, part of the city, part of the route to work, part of the calculation of whether a street, a road, or a region is safe.

Ana described drone warfare as an arms race that moves in steps. “People should look at drone warfare in general,” she said, “not just from the civilian, but from the military [side], as a constant sort of step by step. They make a step, they invent something, and the next step of ours is to figure out how to deal with that.”

This is one of the core insights of the interview. Drone warfare is not a single technological revolution that happens once. It is an adaptive struggle. Russia develops a drone, a guidance method, a camera system, or a way to avoid interception. Ukraine studies it, responds, builds a countermeasure, and then Russia adapts again.

There are clear echoes of the development of aviation in the early part of the 20th century. During the First World War, the first planes were used for scouting, followed by bombers, then fighter aircraft. Whilst a similar pattern is emerging in Ukraine, the rate of development appears much faster. Continuing with the comparison, the dawn of AI combined with drone technology is the drone’s jet age. ^[6]

Ana also placed drones within the broader chronology of attacks on Kharkiv. “Back in ’22,” she said, “we were mostly hit by artillery in Kharkiv.” Russian forces were close enough to hit the city constantly, and she described them “flattening” Pivnichna Saltivka, a large residential area where many people in Kharkiv had lived. Once Russian forces were pushed farther back, that kind of artillery fire became less possible. But the war did not become safe. The tools of destruction changed.

“Artillery became sort of, not obsolete by any means,” she said, “but every year it becomes more of a drone, drone, drone, drone, drone.”

That repetition is worth taking seriously. It captures the way the war has shifted from older images of artillery and trenches toward a constant aerial presence. The drone does not replace every other weapon, but it increasingly shapes the battlefield and the psychology of civilians living near it.

Ana gave the example of drone nets near the front. These are not features of ordinary city life in western or central Ukraine, but closer to the front they have become part of the environment. Roads and areas are covered to make drone attacks harder. The image is almost surreal: civilians and soldiers moving beneath nets, carrying on with life underneath a defensive layer built against machines repeatedly, indiscriminately attempting to take those very lives away.

She also described older methods of defence: ground fire groups, people in vehicles with machine guns trying to shoot drones down. “They still do that,” she said. “We have people in Kharkiv right now who do that. I even know them.”

But the most modern layer is now drone-on-drone warfare. “We’re basically in the process of fully transitioning,” she said, “into drone-on-drone violence, as we say. So it’s just interceptor drones against the attacking drone. So it’s like a Star Wars battle, basically, in the sky, robots against robots.”

That image, robots against robots in the sky, would sound almost fantastical if it were not being described by someone living beneath it.

Ukrainian adaptation, pride, and countermeasures

One danger in writing about Ukraine is portraying Ukrainians only as victims. Ana’s account resists that. Her testimony is full of danger, grief, and fear, but also of competence, humour, and pride.

Ukraine has had to become expert in the practical management of threat. One example is the use of air-raid and tracking apps. During the interview, when sirens went off, Ana checked her app and explained what was happening in real time.

“Our app is absolutely bomb-dot-com, they’re basically right in 99% of cases,” she said, describing it as highly accurate. It told her what kind of object was in the air, where it was flying, and where it was likely going.

“It’s pretty good in terms of just managing your day,” she explained.

From that, she could tell that she was not in immediate danger. “I know that I’m not in an immediate threat,” she said, “but other people who are, obviously can also tell.”

That sentence is quietly devastating. The app gives a degree of control, but not safety. It tells you whether the threat is coming for you or for someone else. It makes the danger legible, but no less unreal.

Ana described this as a practical improvement in daily life. Since the apps became accurate, life “feels a little bit controlled.” That phrase is important. Not controlled. Not safe. Only a little bit more in control.

The same spirit runs through Ukrainian volunteer culture. The app developers are supported because people know they help. Radar groups, volunteers, drone fundraisers, soldiers, civilians: Ana described a society in which the line between military and civilian effort is blurred by necessity.

“They help us, so we support them,” she said. “That’s kind of how the volunteer process works in Ukraine as well.” Later, speaking about soldiers and civilians, she put it more simply: “They defend us, we defend them.”

That may be one of the strongest lines in the interview. It is not sentimental. It is practical and reciprocal, a symbiosis. The soldiers defend civilians physically; civilians support soldiers materially, socially, and emotionally. It is a form of national resilience built not out of slogans, but out of repeated small acts.

The counter-drone story also shows a form of adaptation, though one seeking to maximise non-cooperation.

When Russian drones presented new problems, Ukrainians adapted. Ana described drones that were initially difficult to detect because their altitude signal was misleading. “Our guys had major trouble trying to understand where the hell it is,” she said. Then they figured it out. Now, she said, those drones are taken down much more effectively.

She also described new Russian adaptations. One newer drone type, she said, had been called “Oko Saurona”, the Eye of Sauron, because of a camera positioned at the rear of the drone, giving it this appearance. This created new problems for Ukrainian interceptor drones, because the attacking drone could see interceptors coming from behind.

This matters because it shows drone warfare as a living technological system. A method works until the enemy adapts. Then the countermeasure must also adapt. Ana’s testimony repeatedly returned to this cyclic pattern: invention, response, reinvention, response.

The pride here is not naïve. Ana did not pretend Ukraine has solved the problem. She described new Russian systems, new cameras, new manoeuvres, and new difficulties. But there is a clear sense that Ukrainians are learning faster than outsiders often understand.

This matters because Western debates often ignorantly frame Ukraine primarily in terms of what it lacks. In the now infamous words of Donald Trump, Ukraine doesn’t have the cards.

Ukraine certainly does lack crucial systems, especially for ballistic missile defence. But on the drone front, Ukraine is a pioneer. It is not merely receiving the future of war. It is helping invent the countermeasures to survive it. This year, Ukraine has also begun signing drone-related defence cooperation and export agreements with Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia. ^[7]

The heartbreaking texture of life under drones

The most disturbing parts of Ana’s testimony were not always the most dramatic. Sometimes they were the small details.

Ana described how ordinary sounds become threat-signals. She recalled hearing someone mowing grass in the morning and briefly reacting as if it might be something else. It is not only mopeds, she explained. Any strange mechanical sound can trigger the body. Any moment’s peace in Ukraine has become so immensely fragile.

“You can look at this as like an animal,” she said. “People are a little bit like animals, not in a derogatory sense, but you have that sort of reaction. You hear weird sounds… and then you calm down because you figure out what that is.”

This was one of the most psychologically telling moments in the interview. She was not presenting herself as prone or traumatised in a simplistic way. She was describing a nervous system adapted, hardwired to danger.

When asked whether she was shocked by sounds that turn out not to be drones or missiles, she resisted the word “shocked.” “I wouldn’t say shocked is a strong word,” she said. “It’s like a reaction. It’s like a reflex more than anything. You don’t really think about it.”

Then, when this was posed as experiencing trauma, she again resisted the framing. “Trauma? No, no, no. I wouldn’t say so. It’s just a reflexive sort of thing. It’s just an adaptation, if anything.”

That answer is revealing. From the outside, one might describe everything as trauma. From inside the situation, Ana’s language was more practical. If a sound might mean danger, the body should react. In that context, alertness is not pathology. It is fundamental to survival.

But survival has a cost. “Fireworks are absolutely unbearable,” she said. “Nobody can deal with that.”

She also described the impact of explosions on animals. One friend’s parrot, she said, died after a strike hit across the street. The sound and vibration were enough. The bird had been a pet for decades and might have lived much longer.

“The parrot just died,” she said. “Birds are suffering pretty horribly… we actually had birds straight up, like in a horror movie, dropping dead from the sky.”

That image is difficult to forget. War is often described in terms of territory, weapons, casualties, and strategy. Ana’s account reminds us that war also enters the nervous systems of animals, the behaviour of pets, the routes of birds, and the physical atmosphere of a city. The scars of war reach beyond the obvious.

The emotional centre of the interview came when air-raid sirens went off while we were talking. Ana paused and checked. “Let me check what’s happening,” she said. “You can talk, obviously. I’m sorry that I interrupted you.”

I could hear the sirens through the call. She explained that they were not very close to her. “It’s not really close to my place,” she said. “So it’s not super loud, but you can hear it.”

Then she checked the app and explained the situation: a drone was flying near Kharkiv, but not toward her immediate location. “I know that I’m not in an immediate threat,” she said, “but other people who are, obviously can also tell.”

Impressively, the app can even tell the type of drone. Ana went on to explain, “Right now, my app says that there is a BpLA, which is a drone, an unmanned vehicle. It says what type it is, the place where it’s flying now currently, and where it’s going.”

A few minutes later, she looked again. “People took down that guy who was flying,” she said with a sense of satisfaction.

There is something almost unbearable about the calmness of this exchange. To hear the sound of sirens during wartime is nothing short of haunting. Yet Ana was stoic, practical, and almost apologetic. At one point, after checking the threat, she said: “Can you finish what you were talking about? Because I interrupted you rudely with my air raids.”

That line says more about life under Russia’s invasion than any abstract description could. An air raid becomes an interruption. A drone becomes just another routine thing to deal with. Survival becomes a matter of checking an app, judging distance, and continuing the conversation.

Ana also described the ordinary presence of grief. “Everyone has that experience by now, pretty much, in the east especially of Ukraine,” she said. “If you speak with people, they at the very least know someone who died.”

What changes is not that people stop caring. It is that grief becomes something they are forced to process quickly. “If you see something like that now, it’s not that you don’t feel anything,” she said, “but it’s just very numb.” Then she added: “You process it very fast and you move on.”

Perhaps the most devastating practical detail came when she described the way people prepare for death. “People just have to think about things in terms of practicality,” she said. “Here’s my code, here’s the password to my account… if I die, they can access it. And everyone does that.” This act, common among those who are terminally ill or elderly, is now conducted by millions of Ukrainians.

That is just part of what invasion does to ordinary life.

Where drone warfare is going and what it means for civilians

Ana’s warning was not only about Ukraine. It was about the future of war.

“You don’t know much, it seems, about how modern war works,” she said, speaking of people in the West who still imagine war through older, obsolete categories. “If Iran, China, Russia, whoever attacks, they’re not gonna do it with anything but drones.”

Her point was not that missiles, artillery, or conventional weapons have disappeared. Rather, drones are becoming the most flexible, scalable, and psychologically intrusive tools of modern war. They can scout, strike, harass, hunt, observe, and force entire populations to live under constant low-level threat.

Ana described Ukraine as the place where this new era is being developed. “This is a training field,” she said. “This new era of war is developed, and we are sort of the frontier, but we’re also the testing ground.”

That is a chilling formulation. Ukraine is not only defending itself against Russia’s invasion. It is also being forced to live through the experimental phase of twenty-first-century warfare.

For civilians, this means that the front line is no longer only a line on a map. That line blurs, smudges across the country. The sky far from the point of contact becomes part of the front. A lawnmower, a moped, or thunder can briefly enter the nervous system as a possible threat.

The phrase “human safari,” discussed in the interview with Dylan Burns, captures the apex of cruelty: Russian drone operators hunting civilians. Ana’s testimony shows what lies around that horror: not only the moment of attack, but the entire world of anticipation, adaptation, and aftermath.

“You can hunt people with those,” Ana said of drones. “Which they do.”

She also described what this means in evacuation zones. “In the kill zone,” she explained, if people do not have equipment that can show where the drones are, if their car is not protected, and if they do not have electronic-warfare protection, “you just die.” But with the right equipment, she said, “you have a chance to protect people and get them out of the zones they’re stuck in.”

This is where the humanitarian and military realities merge. Evacuating civilians is no longer simply a question of courage or logistics. It is a drone-warfare problem. Rescue itself needs detection, protection, electronic warfare, and rapid adaptation. Even that is often not enough.

But Ana’s account was not only one of fear. It was also one of Ukrainian response. Apps are built. Volunteers donate. Soldiers adapt. Interceptor drones rise to meet attack drones. Civilians support soldiers, and soldiers defend civilians. A drone appears on the app; minutes later, someone has taken it down.

This is a hopeful lesson not just for Ukraine, but more broadly for future countries facing such heinous acts: people and systems are far more capable of adaptation than appears on the surface.

Nevertheless, adaptation has its limits. Ukraine requires Patriots and air defence that are the responsibility of its western partners. Ukraine has shown extraordinary ingenuity against drones, but it still needs systems capable of stopping ballistic missiles. At the same time, its experience with drones should be taken seriously by every country that wants to understand where war is going. Ukraine’s allies should see the soldier-civilian symbiosis as a blueprint for relations between allies.

Ana was blunt about the future of warfare. “It’s gonna develop,” she said. “It’s gonna get more dystopian, more weird, but it’s gonna be this.”

That warning matters far beyond Ukraine. The war being fought there is not a distant exception. It is a preview.

Toward the end of the conversation, Ana rejected complacency. Fear, she suggested, is not irrational. It is rational if it leads people to act. “War is absolutely atrocious,” she said. “Nothing can be worse.” Then she added: “Not being afraid is horrible. It is healthy. You should be afraid. But here’s the thing: be afraid, but you’re not afraid enough.”

That is not a call for panic. It is a call for seriousness. Western societies do not need to imagine Ukraine’s experience as charity, or as someone else’s tragedy. They can understand support for Ukraine as self-interest: a way to help stop this form of war before it travels further.

Ana put that argument directly. “Westerners live now in a very, very good position to invest in us so they never have to deal with this shit ever.”

That may be the hard truth beneath the entire interview. Ukraine is not only asking to be saved. Ukraine is also warning everyone else what our future can look like. We never expect it to be us.

See the full video of the interview here (Ana enters the conversation approximately 10 minutes in to the video).