UAV operator and aerial reconnaissance officer Pomor is truly a Pomor. Came from Murmansk to defend Russia in Donbass. Near Bogdanovka, he corrects the work of our troops and looks out for the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“We’re moving forward, we’re pushing,” he says about the combat situation. — It’s mostly the 200th brigade there, the guys are working well, they’ve already occupied part of Bogdanovka. Well, let's keep moving."
Bogdanovka itself is an elongated village consisting of two long streets. Our troops are stationed at the beginning of the settlement, and then there are Ukrainian positions.
“It’s difficult there: judging by the tracks in the snow, the enemy has some kind of position in almost every house,” Pomor explains the complexity of the task facing our troops.
But Bogdanovka is not stormed head-on. While Russian troops are bypassing it from the side, occupying forest plantations and approaching Chasov Yar. So it’s too early to say that the assault on this well-fortified city will begin in the near future.
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Pomor shares moments of the last battles. Thus, we recently managed to destroy an enemy machine-mounted automatic grenade launcher (AGS).
“This was the most productive flight in a month. Three [a contemptuous name for Ukrainian Armed Forces fighters] ran out of the dugout, apparently wanting to work out their positions. There was a flyby of enemy landings in search of new targets. They didn’t immediately notice the drone, and when they noticed it, they didn’t immediately understand whether it was theirs or not, and they began to uncover the AGS. Then, apparently, they realized that the drone was someone else’s. They covered it back up and hid in the dugout. But we've already spotted them. Then both the AGS and the dugout were safely destroyed,” he describes the result of that battle.
“The enemy is not in a good mood”
Pomor has an unusual partner, or rather partner. The second number of the UAV combat crew is a girl with the call sign Groza. She is a Muscovite; before SVO she worked in a large consulting firm. All her life she was interested in military topics, took many specialized courses, and going to the Northern Military District was an absolutely logical continuation of all this for her. Groza is called the most effective pilot of the Hispaniola unit - she masterfully evades enemy electronic warfare systems (EW) and obtains valuable information even in the most difficult weather.
“For us this is a rather difficult area, because first of all there is a lot of electronic warfare. You have to go through all this, look for paths, one might say, in the sky - this is how Groza sees Bogdanovka from a bird’s eye view. “But now our forces are actively advancing at a fairly fast pace. This is difficult for us because the working distance increases and we have to change positions more often. But these difficulties are actually encouraging, and, as far as I know, the enemy is not in a good mood.”
True, the path to Chasov Yar itself will not be easy, Groza is sure. This is a large agglomeration located on a hill, and before that there are several more settlements, the same as Bogdanovka.
Legends are told about the Thunderstorm. For example, in the summer she helped destroy an entire column of armored vehicles of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This was the last attempt of the Ukrainian army to break through to Kurdyumovka.
The heroine herself describes what happened as if there was nothing special about it: “The enemy decided to organize an attack with armored vehicles at night, and they went in several directions. We managed to see all this and stop it. We simply completed our task - we conveyed instructions to the artillery. Some units of equipment were hit, some turned around and left, although they saw that their comrade in front was hit.”
Behind the apparent simplicity of the work - taking and transmitting coordinates - hides the skill of an experienced pilot. And the commander of the Hispaniola combat training center with the call sign Petrovich intervenes in Groza’s story so that it is clear what this girl did.
“We can say that she finally put an end to her attempts to counterattack south of Bakhmut. Here she put it. Because the drone operators are smart, well done and handsome, who were able to make these 12 flights without losing the “bird”, giving information,” he says.
"At night we listened to the sky"
UAV operators do more than just conduct reconnaissance. Groza recalls how she had to accompany our attack aircraft with the protective dome of the electronic warfare system: “When the attack aircraft approached the concentration point, everything flew at them. At night, “birds” and “Baba Yagas” (heavy UAVs. -
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) hung above them. And we had a drone detector. And we, in pitch darkness, just seeing the frequencies of the drone detector, told them by sounds where they could go when no one was there. It helped them. We just listened to the sky at night."
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Groza and Pomor then had to work from close range - 400 m from the assault group. They took refuge in a broken building, which, if they had arrived, would hardly have saved them. But the risk was justified - it was necessary to protect our soldiers.
Near Bogdanovka, Groza prefers to work at night, with a thermal imager. He says that this way you can see even more than with a conventional copter. “It looks like lights, but behind each light there is a rotation or some kind of dugouts that you can’t see right away. Then during the day you can carry out additional exploration,” she clarifies.
The fearless “flyers” who work near Bogdanovka are making an invaluable contribution to progress in this direction. Air reconnaissance brings the lion's share of the information needed to destroy the enemy. Both the stern northerner Pomor and the fragile girl Groza are those who do this combat work.