Crowdfunding a war: Ukraine's DIY drone-makers

Ukrainian volunteers practice drone operations, not far from Kiev, before being sent to the eastern-Ukrainian conflict zone for aerial researching. Photograph: Oleg Petrasyuk/EPA

We arrived in Krasnoarmiysk, Ukraine, at 3am. Two soldiers wearing balaclavas and holding Kalashnikov assault rifles came out to meet us, instructing us to suit up in body armour and stay alert during the trip in their truck. We rolled passed checkpoints and sped down deserted, cratered streets. In the distance, we could see the lights of a large city I assumed to be Donetsk, and an hour later they told us we had arrived at a base called Sector B.

Dozens of soldiers slept and snored in the barracks. A pile of camo and backpacks stood at the foots of their beds, as did a gun rack, home to a litany of assault rifles and light machine guns. They woke us at 6am, when a few of the soldiers asked us why we were here. We told them that we had heard they were testing weaponised drones. The soldiers burst out laughing. “What crazy people told you that? You guys should’ve just stayed in Kiev”

At 3pm, three soldiers in balaclavas came and directed us into a truck. “If you want to see what you think you are here to see, come with us now.”

Passing an armoured personnel carrier near the checkpoint, the soldiers started playing the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”. I put my head in my hands and thought, “This is how I die.”

A David versus Goliath-like fight

The war in Eastern Ukraine recently surpassed the one-year mark, and despite numerous attempts at a true ceasefire, the war is only showing signs of worsening. The fighting between the Ukrainian military forces and the Russian-backed separatists has now cost the lives of over 6,000 people – many of them just innocent civilians who became victims of the hellishly inaccurate artillery fire that is a trademark of Soviet-style warfare.

Over one million civilians have fled eastern Ukraine at this point, forever reorganising the country’s landscape. Most hoped that their move would be temporary, but as the war drags on, it’s become clear that there is no home to return to. Cities like Donetsk, which were once stalwarts of Ukraine, are now hopelessly lost to the separatists. Their citizens no longer believe that these cities exist in Ukraine, but rather, in the abstract concept of New Russia, or Novorossiya.

Advertisement

While the world watched, Russia snatched away part of a sovereign state, and then did it again. The west’s only response, despite commitments legalised in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances of 1994, was to slap sanctions on Russia – sanctions that President Putin recently claimed only served to strengthen the Russian Federation.

With little real help coming their way, the Ukrainian people have bound together to stand up to the Russian empire, in a David versus Goliath-like fight. Though a poor citizenry, Ukrainians are finding a way to crowdfund for their troops, supplying them with desperately needed body armour, weapons, machinery – and, perhaps most importantly, drones.

Crowdfunding a war

We were hoping to be the first to document the presence of weaponised drones in Ukraine.

Earlier that week we had been invited to meet with the research and development team at Eleks, one of Ukraine’s top IT outsourcing companies. This team, made up of about seven people, was once tasked with writing software for some secretive projects for major Hollywood studios – they won’t say what – but are now writing software for Ukrainian drones.

These men are from a group called Aerorozvidka – amateur weaponised drones built for the battle against the Russians – yet these aren’t government-sanctioned drones. They are crowdfunded and developed by the hordes of Ukrainian volunteers who have rushed to fill the desperate needs of their soldiers.

As daily fighting continues, the Ukrainian soldiers we spoke with laughed about the idea of a ceasefire. They just wonder where the the next offensive will take place. The seaside city of Mariupol, currently being fortified by Ukrainian troops, seems like the most plausible point of attack.

‘Just a practice bomb’

After a long drive through many checkpoints, including one on the new border out of Ukraine, we arrived at the remains of a village. The soldiers disappeared into one of the few remaining houses, and when they returned, twenty minutes later, the soldier next to me was hugging a two foot long bomb. I looked at the deeply cratered road ahead of us. At least it’ll be quick, I thought.

We pulled away, hearing a firefight to the right of us, and passed armoured vehicles firing towards the separatist forces’ positions until we finally pulled over on a muddy track. Removing a giant box from the roof of the vehicle, the soldiers took out an enormous multirotor drone. Within minutes it was set up and flying thousands of feet above our position. Then they quickly brought it back down – and began to attach the bomb.

The drone pilot fiddled with the controls and two soldiers stepped forward to attach the bomb to a holding mechanism that sprung out from underneath the drone. It was quickly in the air again, hovering just a few hundred feet from our position. And then they dropped the bomb.

But nothing happened. They just laughed, and turned to us saying: “It’s just a practice bomb.”

Then they began to attach another one, one that they wouldn’t show to us. It prompted a few of the other soldiers to take cover behind the truck. We quickly followed.

We had heard from credible sources that in previous attempts, some Aerorozvidka men had been killed during this stage. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, these were essentially homemade and potentially faulty bombs. Secondly, the fact that they were launching drones multiple times from the same position quickly exposed their location. From what I’d been told, a mortar or sniper attack was guaranteed at this point.

The pilot took the controls again, and while taking cover behind the only obstacle blocking the road, he commended the drone to ascend. It rose to a much higher altitude and rapidly traversed the field before stopping to hover over the treeline across from us. Then they dropped the bomb and we watched as it hit the ground. Nothing happened. No explosion.

The soldiers looked dejected but patted each other on the back. They told us that the system wasn’t perfect yet, but they were optimistic that they could have it working without a hitch soon. One knelt down and picked up a piece of shrapnel from a shell and handed it to me. It was the size of my hand. He smiled, and spoke English for the first time in a heavy Ukrainian accent. “A gift from Russia,” he said.

As we packed up and pulled away from the war torn village, Hit Me Baby One More Time with Britney Spears played over the radio

Transitioning from 1950s USSR mapping

Without any sort of military aid coming from the west, Ukraine’s drone organisations have taken it upon themselves to ramp up their efforts. Many in these organisations have now quit their jobs, and serve as full-time volunteers for the Ukrainian forces.

Eleks, which is a private company based in both Ukraine and Nevada, pays healthy salaries. It allows staff to work on software and drone hardware projects that receive no government support or funding during work hours. They are doing this because, as their project manager, Ivan Dmytrasevych, told us, “We know we have to invest in the defence of our country. If our research works, and we can show the people that it works, then we will turn to crowdfunding to realise it.”

The projects Dmytrasevych refers to have two purposes. Firstly, they are designed to help Ukrainian drones automatically return home in the very likely case they are jammed by Russian electronic systems. Ivan says that the Russian forces have highly advanced systems to jam and intercept Ukrainian drones, which can easily send them off course and into enemy hands. “They have $7m systems to jam drones that cost thousands of dollars,” he explains. “We just can’t match their resources.” However, if they can slow down these types of losses, they can build up a useful force.

Secondly, they are building software to help Ukrainian artillery teams. “Just imagine that you take a map of some territory from Google Maps, and then your drone flies over the territory to take a picture. Artillery teams need exact coordinates from enemy positions shown on those images. Our software will help them get it instantly.”

I asked Dmytrasevych how the Ukrainian forces were determining these coordinates now. “They are using paper maps,” he sighs. A soldier we spoke to confirmed this. “These are USSR headquarters maps. They have not been updated since the 1950’s.”

While Eleks works on modernising drone software, another crowdfunded volunteer organisation, aptly named The People’s Project, is busy building highly advanced drones for the Ukrainian special forces.

By virtue of crowdfunding, the People’s Project requires the collaboration of many people, yet its most sophisticated drone program is top secret. It’s so classified that before they began working on the project they registered new social profiles under fake names, using fake pictures.

I asked the project leader, who did not want to be named, why the group felt so threatened. “It’s Ukraine. We’re at war and, with what we are doing, we don’t know who might try to come after us. We are more worried about attacks on our families than our own lives.”

Seeing their most advanced drone, the PD-1, you wonder how a group of regular citizens could come together and build something like this in just a few months. The PD-1 can fly for nine hours at an altitude above 2km, cruising around 100km/h and generating crystal-clear images that soldiers can instantly use on the battlefield.

When I asked them about the prospect of evading Russian electronic systems, although they wouldn’t say exactly why, they claimed they knew the PD-1 would never be captured.

While Eleks builds software, and the People’s Project builds drones, Aerorozvidka are in the thick of things at the front. As Ivan from Eleks told us: “Aerorozvidka. Oh, here we are just geeks – those guys are something else.”