The most challenging part of an international aerobatics contest is the Free Unknown. Pilots arrive at a competition after having polished sequences of loops, stall turns, and barrel rolls. But for the Free Unknown section they learn which assortment of tricks they must perform only a day in advance. Contestants plan out how they will string together the stipulated moves in the most pleasing fashion, but they cannot rehearse the routine, except in their minds. It’s a test of imagination and airmanship that often decides the competition.
In 2019, the World Intermediate Aerobatics Championship, which was held on an airfield in the Czech town of Břeclav, contained three Free Unknowns. The winner of the first was a twenty-five-year-old Ukrainian pilot named Timur Fatkullin. At the controls of his red-and-silver Extra 330LX—a nimble German sports plane—he made the unusual move of starting his sequence upside down. He then executed a complicated routine as if he’d practiced it for months. The Ukrainian team, boosted by Fatkullin’s performance, won gold. Trevor Dugan, who served as a navigator with the R.A.F. in Afghanistan and Iraq, was on the British team, which took bronze. Fatkullin, he said, was “absolutely phenomenal.”
Not long after that championship, Fatkullin stopped entering aerobatics competitions: first came the pandemic, then the war with Russia. He moves through life impatiently. Now thirty-two, he has five children. He is tall, with a tight beard, pale-green eyes, and a square jaw. Even in casual situations, he stands ramrod straight, as though about to give or receive an order. He often wears a shirt with three buttons undone, a beige leather flying jacket with the collar turned up, combat pants, and Nike high-tops. He plays the guitar, a little piano. He often carries a thick fold of high-value bills. He speaks several languages, including English (almost perfectly) and Spanish (conversationally). He once spent thirty days in jail after breaking the ribs of a man who’d threatened his wife. (The case never reached trial.) He can dance the tango.
When Fatkullin was in his mid-twenties, he started doing stunts with a group of other extreme athletes: parachutists, motorcyclists, a free diver. They eventually named themselves Aerotim. Fatkullin began developing a travelling one-hour show that would combine various modes of daredevilry—he told me that he’d wanted it to be so exhilarating that audience members “wouldn’t have time to lick their ice cream.” Shortly after winning his gold medal in the Czech Republic, Fatkullin had an idea for a trick that could be the show’s centerpiece. He called Serhii Gusak, a Ukrainian motorcyclist, to discuss it.
Gusak and Fatkullin are bosom friends but contrasting characters. Gusak, who is thirty-eight, has a surfer’s vibe. He wears hoodies and baggy jeans and drives a turquoise Volkswagen minivan. Tattoos cover his left shoulder and arm. As a younger man, he studied landscape gardening at a university in Kyiv before dropping out. Afterward, he took various unusual jobs to support his passion for motorcycles, including one as a mortuary driver. In 2008, he bought his first motocross bike—a vintage Česká Zbrojovka—from a priest in the east of Ukraine, after transporting a body there for burial.
When Fatkullin called, Gusak was performing in circuses. Fatkullin invited him to meet in the Carpathian region, near the border with Poland, to try something new. A crew would set up giant ramps some seventy feet apart. Fatkullin, flying his Extra just a few feet above the ground, would aim for the gap between the ramps. As Fatkullin approached the gap, Gusak would charge up a ramp so that he would be vaulting above the plane at the moment it passed beneath. While arcing over the plane, Gusak would do a Cordova—gripping the handlebars and performing a midair backbend.
Gusak agreed to attempt the trick, and, knowing that Fatkullin’s flying was reliable, felt relaxed until he was revving his engine. Then he saw that Fatkullin, without having forewarned him, was approaching the ramps upside down. Inverted flying at such a low altitude is inherently dangerous. The risks for both men had increased dramatically. Gusak could have pulled out. Instead, he told himself, “I can’t fail.” He zoomed up the ramp.
At nine o’clock on a frigid, moonless but starry night this past March, four years and a few days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I boarded a dull-gray Antonov-28—a light turboprop transport aircraft with twin propellers—at an airfield in central Ukraine. (I cannot describe the location more precisely because of security considerations.) Fatkullin sat in the pilot’s seat. He wore a teal helmet with a microphone, a navy-blue flight suit with his name over his heart, and the usual Nike high-tops. Gusak was in the rear of the plane, in a green flight suit. He sat next to an automatic six-barrel minigun, frequently used in helicopters, and several boxes of ammunition. A co-pilot, two crew members, and a photographer also climbed on board. There was plenty of room: an Antonov-28, which is about forty feet long, is a troop carrier that can accommodate nineteen people.
The engines bellowed, and the plane started taxiing to the runway. Gusak, who was watching a motocross video on Instagram, tucked his phone away. We soon lifted off. Ukrainian air defenses had just spotted a Shahed—a delta-winged kamikaze drone, which Russia has used to terrorize Ukraine’s civilian population and knock out critical infrastructure—flying in the direction of the airfield. Fatkullin was on his way to destroy it.
Shaheds, made of black carbon fibre, are eleven feet long and have a wingspan of about eight feet. Weighing only four hundred and fifty pounds, they can fly missions of up to sixteen hundred miles, a range that allows them to strike anywhere in Ukraine. The drones’ noisy engines make them easy to hear—they sound like a dirt bike—but they are hard to spot in the night sky with the naked eye. Fatkullin and his men had a system. The crew members located the Shahed using a thermal-imaging camera affixed to the nose of the Antonov. Fatkullin and Gusak then worked by eye, using a spotlight positioned under the left wing and controlled by Fatkullin. They also wore night-vision goggles. Once Fatkullin had positioned the Antonov so that the drone was flying parallel to the aircraft on his left side, Gusak used the minigun to shoot it down.
Gusak put on a flak jacket and a parachute rig. I was also wearing a parachute. I’ve jumped from a plane only once—in 2006, on vacation in Namibia, when I paid for a tandem skydive with an instructor, who pulled the cord. Gusak, who has a two-year-old daughter, had said that the parachutes were necessary precautions. A Shahed has up to a hundred and ten pounds of munitions in its warhead. If one hit the plane, or exploded close by, the Antonov could lose power, catch fire, or be riddled with shrapnel. Such things had happened. Gusak gave me a quick tutorial—jump, count to three, pull here—and helped me tighten my straps.
We flew northeast. The crew members monitored a radar map of Ukraine on an iPad, which showed enemy targets in red and Ukrainian aircraft in blue. After about half an hour in the air, the target we were following disappeared from the screen: it had either crashed or been taken out by other air defenses. Four more Shaheds soon appeared, however, all travelling from the direction of the eastern city of Sumy, which is on the front line of the war. Shortly after 11 p.m., Fatkullin spoke over the radio (in English, for my benefit): “Targets are inbound, about fifty kilometres away. We are on opposite courses.” Behind me, Gusak laid his minigun on a mat and opened the door through which he’d fire the weapon. The cabin filled with cold air.
One of the crew members watched a screen, positioned between the minigun and the cockpit, that showed video from the thermal-imaging camera. He soon located a good target. On the thermal footage, the Shahed’s engine blazed like a comet; the rest of the drone looked like a grayish-white paper dart. A laser in the Antonov’s camera measured the distance to the Shahed. We were sixty-five hundred feet away—too far, on a moonless night, to see it without assistance. Fatkullin brought the plane closer, and then began a kind of courtly dance: we swept around from behind the drone until it was at our eleven o’clock, and then our ten o’clock. Gusak could not fire until it was between eight and nine o’clock. The distance to the drone decreased to twelve hundred feet. I glimpsed it out of the left window. There was something melodramatic about the image: picked out by the spotlight, the black drone, above forests and fields, looked like an opera soloist. Gusak peered over the top of the minigun, attempting to fix the target in his night-vision goggles. The distance to the Shahed dropped to less than a thousand feet. We were now in range.
Fatkullin was born in Chornomorske, a small town on the northwestern coast of the Crimean Peninsula, in 1993, two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The town was part of newly independent Ukraine, but, like everyone else on the peninsula, Fatkullin grew up speaking Russian. He habitually uses Ukrainian now, except when he is under unusual stress in the cockpit—at such moments, he reverts to the language of his childhood.
Fatkullin’s parents both studied philosophy in college and became high-school teachers. Their apartment was full of literature, but as a child Fatkullin wasn’t interested in books. (He has since become an avid reader and is fond of the mid-century novels of the French writer and aviator Romain Gary.) The young Fatkullin was beguiled by American films—especially those in which a charismatic leading man assembles a crew for a heist. He particularly adored Lewis Milestone’s “Ocean’s Eleven.”
In the summer, Chornomorske was bliss for an outdoorsy child: Fatkullin could dive in the Black Sea without a mask, because the water is only lightly salinated. But for nine months a year, he told me, the weather was “terrible” and the town bored him. He joined a rock-climbing club that organized trips to competitions elsewhere in Crimea. When he was eleven, he was on one such excursion near Simferopol; sitting on a cliff top, he saw a small plane performing aerobatic maneuvers, trailed by white smoke. He remembers thinking, Who is that guy?
At the age of twenty-one, Fatkullin moved to Kyiv and sought out a flying instructor. He spent five thousand dollars that he’d earned from summer jobs to train for a pilot’s license. The experience of flying solo for the first time, he remembered, was “amazing,” but the thrill quickly faded. He asked himself, “Is this it? This was not what I saw in the movies.” Somebody at the airfield gave him the number of a sport pilot who could teach him aerobatics. The instructor was also from Crimea. Fatkullin told him the story of the plane he’d seen in the valley when he was eleven. When the instructor said that he’d been taught by that very pilot, Fatkullin felt the grip of fate.
Flying is costly, but Fatkullin has always had commercial instincts. As a young man in Crimea, he dabbled in what he called gray-market schemes, buying and selling stolen motorbikes—a market that seems more black than gray—and then launched a currency-exchange business. By 2014, he told me, the currency exchange was on its way to becoming a legitimate company with multiple investors. (That year, Russia annexed Crimea; he hasn’t visited the peninsula since 2016.) Fatkullin also has a knack for finding patrons. In 2018, he obtained access to his first stunt plane, the Extra 330LX, when its owner, a Kyiv logistics company that offered to support his aerobatics career, allowed him and his instructor to use it. The plane’s registration mark, UR-TIM, suggests that the plane was always Fatkullin’s in all but name; since the war began, its ownership has formally passed to his wife, who is also a pilot.
In about 2017, Fatkullin became interested in “formation flying,” in which several planes fly close together in a synchronized way. It’s perilous, but Fatkullin enjoyed the communal aspect of it, and how formation fliers spoke their own private language, much of it gestural. A fist raised with the arm bent at ninety degrees, for example, was the signal for a wingman to cross under your plane. The addictive part of formation flying was that it required absolute trust among the pilots.
Fatkullin recently told me that there was no magic in aerobatics—you just had to practice and repeat maneuvers enough for something that “looks dangerous” to be safe. That’s how he and his team approached the inverted-plane-motorbike trick—which they executed beautifully the first time, and several times after that. Before the first attempt, Fatkullin had flown upside down for many weeks, going closer to the ground as his confidence increased. His breakthrough was to suspend his normally methodical mode of thinking. When flying upside down, all the controls seem to work in reverse; if Fatkullin thought too much about which way was left and right, he “got into a mess.” It helped to embrace an “improvisational” mind-set. Fatkullin loves jazz, and he told me, “You don’t want to stop Jimmy Cobb”—the drummer on “Kind of Blue”—“in the middle of a drum solo and say, ‘Play again from that part.’ ”
On February 24, 2022, when Russia sent troops across Ukraine’s northern border, Fatkullin was in Latvia. He was just months away from finally taking the Aerotim show on tour. That life was over, Fatkullin realized.
He arranged for his wife, Valeriya Guzema, and their first child together, a boy, to move to Spain. (He had two other kids from a previous relationship; they now live with their mother in England.) Guzema, the C.E.O. of a jewelry company based in Kyiv, begged him not to volunteer for the military. Service-aged men with three or more children were exempt from conscription. But Fatkullin wanted to serve his country—by flying in combat.
Fatkullin believed that he was the only nonmilitary pilot in Ukraine to have qualified to fly an Aero L-39 Albatros, which the country’s Air Force uses to train jet pilots. He expected to be fast-tracked into a fighter program, but, as he tells it, recruiters were reluctant, in part because his Crimean background aroused suspicion. (Many residents of the peninsula supported the annexation.) The most troublesome word on his résumé, Fatkullin told me, was “Sevastopol”—the Crimean city where he’d attended college. The recruiting officers let him know that he was unlikely to attain a full security clearance and thus had little chance of flying missions anytime soon.
Fatkullin’s next call was to the Ukrainian Border Guard, which owns a helicopter fleet. A representative said that the Border Guard rarely engaged in aerial combat. Unwilling to experience a boring war, Fatkullin declined.
Frustrated, he returned to his crew at Aerotim, which was becoming well known for videos it posted online. The group collaborated with a videographer, Nazar Doroshkevych, who specialized in drone photography. In a viral clip from 2020, a skydiver named Alex Marushko stands atop a hot-air balloon in a white bathrobe, four thousand feet above Ukraine at dawn, drinking coffee. Fatkullin roars by in his plane. Then Marushko jumps. To Fatkullin’s knowledge, it was the first video featuring a skydiver on top of a hot-air balloon. “Everyone is copying us now,” he told me.
In 2023, another Aerotim short attracted worldwide attention. It was filmed by a GoPro camera affixed to a fast-paced drone. Fatkullin is flying a yellow-and-black L-39—the fighter trainer—above a frozen landscape. He does a “tailslide,” in which a plane ascends nearly vertically until it loses momentum and then slides backward toward the earth, tail first, before levelling out. That year, the video was one of fifty-five to win GoPro’s Million Dollar Challenge, a contest for the most “epic moments” filmed on the company’s devices.
Fatkullin was busy, but he did not feel useful in a country at war. However, Ukraine’s Air Force had noticed Aerotim’s videos. The Army Aviation division asked him to make a film about a new program that used helicopters to counter one of Russia’s aerial threats: drones.
In September, 2022, Russia fired its first Shahed into a Ukrainian city. It killed a civilian in Odesa. The weapon has since transformed the war. Each drone costs less than fifty thousand dollars. A barrage of such attacks has become a relatively inexpensive way for Russia to cause severe damage to Ukraine. The Russians use a variety of similar models: the original Shahed-136, which was manufactured by Iran, and Russian adaptations such as the Geran-2. Ukrainians refer to all such drones as Shaheds.
Although the earlier models have a cruising speed of only a hundred and ten miles per hour, Shaheds are not easy to destroy. They often evade radar by flying low. Ukraine has attempted to locate and destroy them using fighter jets, helicopters, anti-aircraft missiles, electronic jammers, machine guns on the ground, and its own drones. But hundreds of Shaheds can be launched in a single attack, and a few always defeat these countermeasures.
Shaheds often target energy and military infrastructure, but they also hit civilian buildings. More than six hundred civilians were killed in Ukraine last year by long-range munitions (Shaheds and missiles), and some forty-five hundred people were injured. Ukrainians have grown accustomed to, and have learned to fear, the buzzing sound of an approaching attack. Medical authorities say that drone-induced anxiety is rising among civilians. A 2025 paper by American and Ukrainian psychiatrists called the Shaheds a “psychological weapon” as well as an actual weapon.
Aerotim’s film shoot for the Ukrainian Army Aviation division introduced Fatkullin to a way of fighting back. He observed the crew of an Mi-8 helicopter that used a thermal camera to locate drones. A pilot would maneuver the helicopter so that a door gunner could shoot effectively. Fatkullin logged fifty-five hours in the air with the crew, during which the gunner destroyed forty Shaheds. Fatkullin was enraptured not just by the ingenuity of the approach but by its aesthetic. “It’s air-to-air combat, almost like World War Two,” he told me. “It’s a dream job.”
Fatkullin also saw limitations to the Army Aviation division’s approach. An Mi-8 tops out at a hundred and fifty-five miles per hour—too slow to chase down newer Shaheds, which are jet-powered and can exceed three hundred miles per hour. He also realized that he had honed a skill especially conducive to hunting drones: formation flying. In order to shoot down a drone with a door gunner, the pilot had to fly at exactly the correct angle and distance from the target.
If Fatkullin couldn’t join the military, he decided, he would try to form a civilian unit that could destroy Shaheds. He began looking for a plane that was suited for drone-hunting, with room for a door gunner and for a crew member who could operate a thermal-imaging monitor. At about this time, on the airfield where he kept his sports planes, he met a pilot named Valerii Slipkan.
Slipkan, who is now sixty-six, is a short and burly Ukrainian with expressive eyebrows, a warm smile, and a quick temper. In the eighties, he was a fighter pilot for the U.S.S.R., based in Estonia. He flew MIG-23s and Su-27s, the jewels in the Soviet Air Force’s crown. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Slipkan returned to Ukraine and joined its Air Force. In 1995, he left to become an aviation consultant, and he worked for many years as a commercial pilot in Africa. Later, he helped transport NATO troops in Afghanistan.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Slipkan told Air Force recruiters that he could fly a fighter jet, but they said that he was too old. He became an infantry soldier in the Territorial Defense Forces instead. For three months, he served outside Mykolaiv, near the Black Sea, and completed a pair of ten-day rotations. To his frustration, he didn’t fight in any battles.
In August, 2022, Slipkan borrowed a Yak-52—an aerobatics plane—and, along with a door gunner, began searching for Russian reconnaissance drones. They took periodic flights for nine months but hit no targets, in part because it was so hard to locate the drones at night. When he met Fatkullin, the two realized that they shared an ambition to hunt Shaheds, and decided to team up. Slipkan told Fatkullin that a businessman he knew from his Africa days had lent him an Antonov-28 that had been used for skydiving before the war. Slipkan admired Fatkullin’s piloting skills, telling me that, just as some swimmers feel most comfortable in the water, “Timur feels better in the sky.”
The admiration was mutual. Fatkullin loved hearing Slipkan’s tales about his Soviet missions in fighter jets. And Fatkullin was deeply moved when he learned that Slipkan had suffered personally in the war. In September, 2022, his son was killed on the front line, in circumstances that he still finds almost impossible to discuss. Slipkan told me recently, “Everything that I’m not able to give to my son anymore, I give to Timur and the guys.”
For a year, the two men petitioned Ukrainian military authorities to let them form a unit for shooting down Shaheds. Meanwhile, the incidence of drone attacks on Ukraine was increasing. But, in Fatkullin’s telling, nobody in a senior defense role wanted responsibility for the unit. Eventually, in June, 2025, the necessary paperwork was signed, after Fatkullin and Slipkan agreed to be liable if they caused an accident or downed a drone over a populated area. Technically, the group would be a volunteer unit of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, but under the operative control of the Air Force. Officially, the unit was called the Air Defense Group. Privately, Ukrainians called it Aerotim.
One of the first people Fatkullin contacted was Serhii Gusak, the motorbike daredevil. Gusak, a pacifist, had spent the war true to his principles. For the first year, he had delivered humanitarian aid in Kyiv and eastern Ukraine on behalf of charities. He also soldered parts for a firm making interceptor drones that the Ukrainians used to target Russia’s reconnaissance aircraft. But he wanted to find a more active way to defend his country. He considered training as a medical-evacuation worker for injured fighters.
Fatkullin’s call came as a relief. Joining the unit would let Gusak protect Ukrainians without getting blood on his hands. (Fatkullin told me that his friend “doesn’t want to kill Russians,” adding, “I don’t have this problem.”) Fatkullin proposed that Gusak become his door gunner, shooting drones with a minigun. The work was perilous, because the door gunner would be more exposed to shrapnel than the rest of the crew, but Gusak accepted the role. He received two days of training from a former military officer on how to work and maintain the weapon.
On the night of July 4, 2025, Aerotim flew its first drone-hunting mission, over central Ukraine. Fatkullin wasn’t exactly a fighter pilot, since his opponent was an unmanned drone, but he wasn’t not one, either. (The French term for a fighter pilot, “pilote de chasse”—“hunter pilot”—seems most appropriate for this work.) After a target had been locked in the sights of the thermal-imaging camera, Slipkan, in the right-hand seat, navigated toward the Shahed. Fatkullin took the controls once he could see the drone with his own eyes. Gusak was ready with his gun.
At first, the crew members weren’t sure how close to a Shahed they needed to be for the minigun to be effective—or how far away they should fly so that the Antonov would not be crippled by shrapnel if one exploded. Sometimes, they came disconcertingly close to colliding with a drone; other times, they lost track of it. On one of the first flights, Gusak peered out of the hatch and watched in alarm as a Shahed drifted upward toward their fuselage. Gusak could read the Russian letters on its wing. He remembers it rising in the dark-blue sky “like a big black fish.” The crew avoided making contact with the Shahed and eventually destroyed it, along with three others. From then on, Fatkullin described such missions as “flying combat.”
A few days after I arrived in Kyiv, I was driven to Aerotim’s base. The country was emerging from its coldest winter in more than a decade—a season made even more punishing because of Russian strikes on energy infrastructure, which caused many residents of Ukraine to spend weeks without heat. It was a sunny afternoon, and through the car window I could see that many lakes and some rivers remained frozen solid; fishermen walked on the glittering ice. On a narrow rural road, the car suddenly turned off at a place where there seemed to be no exit, passed through a line of trees, and emerged onto an airfield next to the dilapidated remains of several warehouses.
The airfield, once used by crop-sprayers, was itself in disrepair. The Antonov-28 was parked next to a metal shed that housed a workshop. To jury-rig a weathervane, an empty soda bottle with some hazard tape attached had been placed upside-down on a stick. By a grassy mound, steep steps led to a hidden bunker. Fatkullin and his crew had built a second exit to the bunker in case the front entrance was hit by a missile.
There was a good reason for using a ruined-looking airfield: the Russians were less likely to target such a base with missiles or drones. For a few months, Aerotim had used another airfield, where Fatkullin continues to keep his sports planes in an architect-designed, concrete-and-steel hangar that has been featured in style magazines. The Antonov, however, was too large to join the other planes inside.
Earlier in my trip, Fatkullin had taken me on an aerobatic flight from that airfield in his Extra 330LX. The plane, now clad in silvery vinyl, shimmered in the sunlight. Above a landscape still white with snow, Fatkullin performed heart-stopping tricks. (I may have closed my eyes as the plane barrel-rolled toward the earth, then levelled out at the last possible second.) Near Fatkullin’s concrete hangar were the blackened ruins of some older hangars—a result of Shaheds hitting the airfield.
At the new base, the bunker was equipped with cots, a square dining table, rudimentary cooking devices, and stacks of batteries and L.E.D. lights. In a corridor, a communications hub with several computer screens and landline telephones was manned, twenty-four hours a day, by low-paid crew members who fielded calls from Ukrainian air-defense officials identifying targets that Fatkullin’s team needed to destroy.
The airfield hummed with activity. Stanislav Lenko, an amiable, potbellied mechanic, smoked cigarettes while working in the shed. Slipkan knew him from his time in Africa, when Lenko was considered a nonpareil engineer of the Antonov-28. At the start of the drone-hunting project, Slipkan asked him to come to the airfield “for a few days.” He had never left.
Lenko, a fifty-six-year-old who has a wife and two children living elsewhere in Ukraine, sleeps in makeshift accommodations by the runway. He regularly fixes shrapnel holes in the Antonov’s fuselage after a Shahed explodes near the plane. He plays a quiet, fatherly role with the crew. Fatkullin told me that Lenko worried “every minute” that the plane was in the air, and relaxed only when it landed safely. One evening, Lenko served everyone a hearty lamb soup called shurpa; he had slow-cooked the dish for twenty-four hours. Lenko is also unofficially in charge of the many stray dogs who roam the premises. He helped to save the life of a pregnant mutt, which he’d named Lucky. During the period I spent with Aerotim, Lucky gave birth to her puppies, which looked like black-and-white gerbils. The men doted on them.
Like most people at the airfield, Lenko initially worked unpaid—a situation that went on for months before reaching a crisis point in January, when several volunteers told Fatkullin they couldn’t continue without wages. A Ukrainian company—Fatkullin declined to give the name—now provides basic salaries for half of the dozen or so people at the base. Fatkullin himself pays for the operational expenses of all the others. He has sold a stake in two properties and a cryptocurrency business he’d founded in order to finance the unit’s expenses, which he estimates at ten thousand dollars a month. The Ukrainian military provides free fuel and ammunition.
On a workbench outside the shed, Gusak and a friend took apart the minigun and cleaned it while listening to “Riders on the Storm” on a Bluetooth speaker. Fatkullin explained that he had bought the weapon secondhand from a gunship in the Black Sea. (Dillon Aero, an American firm, made the weapon, and it now supports Aerotim with spare parts and training.) Fatkullin then showed me various exterior markings on the Antonov. Several lines of symbols denoted drones that the crew had shot down. When I saw it, the total was a hundred and seventy-one. Most of the symbols showed the black Shahed shape, but a different stencil had been used to evoke the Chinese DFX drone—a smaller version of the Shahed—and the Russian Gerbera “decoy” drone, which normally contains no warhead and is deployed to misdirect the attention of air defenses. On a tail fin, the crew had stencilled a Playboy Bunny smoking a cigar. “Kinda cool,” Fatkullin said.
A drone-hunting mission can theoretically begin at any moment, but Shahed attacks in daytime are relatively rare. The first afternoon I visited the airfield, the skies seemed quiet, and Fatkullin announced that he wanted to take a training flight. In addition to the minigun, he and his crew members had begun using P1-Sun interceptor drones, which they released from brackets underneath the wings of the Antonov to hunt Shaheds. P1-Suns are made in Ukraine by a company called SkyFall and look like short, squat rockets. Their name is a bawdy joke: in Ukrainian, “pisun” is slang for “tiny penis.” P1-Suns were effective at intercepting Shaheds when piloted from the ground, but much less reliable when fired from a plane and piloted by someone on board the Antonov. (A SkyFall representative told me in March that he wasn’t surprised by the discrepancy but couldn’t explain it; the software has since been improved.)
Fatkullin said that the interceptors made him nervous. He showed me a video of a P1-Sun that his crew had launched from the Antonov. It had failed to find the target, instead buzzing around the plane like a distressed bee. The interceptor had a payload of nearly two pounds of munitions, and it could travel up to two hundred miles an hour. Fatkullin worried about a P1-Sun accidentally bringing down the Antonov.
Nevertheless, he could see that it might ultimately be safer to fire interceptor drones than to use the minigun. The drones could be launched as far as six miles away from a target, mitigating the danger of a Shahed exploding close to the plane. And Aerotim had enjoyed some limited success using the interceptors. Alex Marushko, the skydiving daredevil who had jumped from the top of the hot-air balloon, was now a drone pilot for Aerotim, and had recently used P1-Suns to destroy three Shaheds from the Antonov in a single sortie.
Marushko, who has a shaved head and a sunny disposition, was at the airfield, and he helped affix an interceptor drone to the Antonov’s right wing. Since this was a training flight, the P1-Sun would have no munitions. We entered the plane using a drop-down ramp at the back. Fatkullin and Slipkan took their seats in the pilots’ cabin, which was demarcated by a flimsy curtain, and Marushko sat on a bench in front of a large screen.
The cycling of the turboprop engines was reminiscent of a busy laundromat; the vibrations stayed in your body long after the flight. As we reached an altitude of about six hundred feet, Marushko put on “first-person view” goggles, which allow a drone pilot to feel as if he were looking out of the cockpit of a traditional plane. He launched the interceptor drone, which shot out of its bracket and away from the plane. He wanted to see if he could land the P1-Sun at the airfield. This, he said, was a much harder skill than hitting a Shahed, since an interceptor must land vertically, like a rocket launch in reverse.
Controlling the interceptor, Marushko looked as if he were playing a particularly engrossing game on a V.R. headset. Fatkullin called me forward and asked if I wanted to fly the plane. Sure, I said. (I don’t have a pilot’s license but I have flown before, under instruction.) The controls were heavy. To change direction, I had to yank the yoke with both hands, as if I were using reins to guide a stubborn horse. When Fatkullin is drone-hunting, he moves the yoke with his left hand only, because his right hand is controlling the spotlight that picks out the Shahed. He’d told me that the missions really “use your body,” and I now understood what he meant.
Just as I was becoming accustomed to the controls, I noticed, through the left window, a human body flying toward the ground. It was Marushko. He had landed his drone and was now parachuting back to the airfield, for fun.
The threat of Shahed attacks has grown and mutated. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American nonprofit that monitors the Ukraine conflict, has said that, between late 2024 and early 2025, average weekly launches from Russia rose from seventy-five to about nine hundred. According to the Ukrainian military’s data, in February, 2026, the weekly average was about twelve hundred and sixty-five. This surge has stretched air defenses, especially because Ukraine has limited resources. The Aerotim crew members laughed ruefully when they heard that, in the war in Iran, the U.S. and the Gulf states were responding to Shahed attacks using multiple Patriot missiles. Each Patriot costs about four million dollars.
Shaheds look broadly the same as before, but their navigation systems have become more sophisticated. When a Shahed crashes or is shot down, Ukrainian investigators examine the wreckage. They often find a mishmash of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian parts. They have also found Ukrainian SIM cards and modems inside drones, suggesting that they were using Ukrainian cellular networks to navigate. Some models have cameras so that pilots in Russia can steer the drones remotely or conduct surveillance. Russia is now equipping Shaheds with air-to-air missiles that can attack pursuing aircraft. Others carry antitank mines. Perhaps most worryingly, evidence has lately emerged that a few Shaheds have been acting as mother ships for first-person-view drones, bringing these precisely directed weapons far beyond the front line, where they normally operate.
Fatkullin is sure that a few Shaheds have sensed the Antonov and attempted to evade it. On a recent mission, he lost a target because it began to slip in and out of the clouds, frustrating his ability to keep a spotlight on it. He also believes that some Shaheds have turned around to attack his plane. In January and February, Shaheds destroyed three Ukrainian helicopters that were hunting drones. The pace of technological innovation in the Ukraine war is dizzying. Fatkullin and his crew understand that the first time they learn of some new anti-aircraft measure on a Shahed, the discovery may accompany their plane’s midair destruction.
For now, the main danger remains the problem of proximity to an exploding target. This past summer, Slipkan suspended Gusak for a few days after he smoked a vape in the cabin—a harmless enough lapse that nevertheless offended Slipkan’s Soviet-era sense of discipline. The replacement gunner had a military background but wasn’t adept at picking out Shaheds at night. Fatkullin had positioned a Shahed about three hundred feet away from the plane, between eight and nine o’clock, but the new gunner told his pilot that he did not have a visual. Fatkullin, frustrated, prepared to leave the area. As the plane maneuvered, the gunner spotted the drone and began firing. By this point, the Shahed was perilously close and positioned at seven o’clock. When it exploded, the tail of the Antonov was hit, its fuel tank was punctured, and the back ramp came open. Slipkan staggered to the back of the plane to close the ramp; another crew member grabbed him by the belt so that he would not fall out. Fatkullin, fearing that the plane was about to catch fire, made a quick forced landing.
Most of the job is waiting. While on duty, the crew must remain in a state known as “Readiness Two”: close to the airfield, prepared to answer a call to flight. During Readiness Two, Fatkullin, Gusak, and the other crew members spend much of their time in a two-story wooden lodge in a nearby forest, where the vibe is somewhere between a co-working space and a low-energy frat house. The men survive on pistachios and orange juice, with the occasional meal at a local restaurant. Once, I opened a refrigerator to find that its sole occupant was a can of Red Bull.
The crew spends some days sleeping off their night missions. Everyone shares a room with someone else, but Fatkullin prefers not to bunk with Gusak, because Gusak snores. Fatkullin has a yellow exercise bike that the men take turns using. This past winter, he and Gusak also rode motorbikes on a frozen river near the property. At night, everyone goes to bed with their phones by their heads, in case they get the call of “Readiness One.” When this instruction is given, the men must be at the airfield within fifteen minutes. It is ten minutes from the lodge to the airfield if they drive fast, which they do, but that leaves little time for preparations. The crew members sleep with their flight suits and thermal underwear laid out beside their beds.
At one-forty-five on a recent Wednesday morning, Fatkullin’s phone buzzed: Readiness One. We dressed and ran to a black S.U.V. parked outside the lodge, and were in the car four minutes after the call. At the dark airfield, many of the dogs were barking. Crew members wearing headlamps positioned L.E.D.s on the runway to guide takeoff; Gusak waddled onto the plane with his heavy minigun; Marushko affixed P1-Sun interceptor drones to their brackets. When everybody was on board, the back ramp was closed, and the Antonov taxied onto the runway. My heart was racing. Gusak idled on a bench seat.
Inside the plane, Marushko used an iPad to inspect a radar map. He showed me two icons down by the southern port of Odesa which resembled red flywheels. These icons indicated that an audio detector had picked up the sound of a Shahed, which couldn’t yet be seen on radar. The icons “should turn into Shaheds,” he said.
This didn’t happen. After ten tense minutes of waiting, the plane taxied off the runway. Either the red flywheels had not been drones or a Ukrainian fighter jet or helicopter had intercepted the targets. Fatkullin’s crew was back at Readiness Two.
It was nearly 4 a.m. when we returned to the lodge. Fatkullin and Gusak find it difficult to sleep after an aborted Readiness One call. Fatkullin told me that they sometimes toggled between Readiness One and Readiness Two three times in a single night, without flying. The oscillation wore on their nerves. In some ways, the missions were easier.
Back at the lodge, Fatkullin checked a radar app on his phone. Few Shaheds were in the sky, and it seemed unlikely that his crew would be called out again. He opened a bottle of red wine. For an hour, he and Gusak lingered over their glasses, laughing and looking at videos on their phones, before finally going to bed as the sun came up.
During my stay in Ukraine, Fatkullin announced that he was travelling to Western Europe—he asked me not to be more specific—to buy another plane for the unit. He had a new idea for attacking drones: using a light aircraft with machine guns attached to the front. This scheme required a two-man pilot-navigator crew, with the pilot operating the weapons. I saw why this concept appealed to him. Not only might it be effective at destroying Shaheds; it would also satisfy Fatkullin’s fighter-pilot ambitions. In the Antonov, he had complained to me, “I’m a jet pilot driving a bus.”
Fatkullin had identified a used two-seater aircraft that was ideal for the task: a former aerobatics plane owned by a private aviation company in Western Europe. (He asked me not to name the model or the vender, for security reasons.) The plane could easily outpace even a jet-powered Shahed but could still cruise alongside a regular Shahed. By contrast, the F-16 fighter jets owned by the Ukrainian Air Force stall at about the speed that a Shahed normally flies.
The aircraft Fatkullin wanted cost several hundred thousand dollars. Aerotim had raised most of the money from sponsors in Ukraine. (Fatkullin asked me not to name them, either, since it could make them targets of Russia.) A representative of Dillon Aero told me that it was providing a machine-gun apparatus and other materials collectively worth more than a million dollars. Fatkullin hoped to solicit a top-range thermal-imaging camera and a mount from another firm.
Currently, it’s impossible to fly commercially to or from Ukraine, and Fatkullin wanted to combine his trip to inspect the new plane with a visit to his older children, in England. He and I boarded an eleven-hour night train to Chelm, in Poland, took a car to Warsaw, and then flew to London on a low-cost airline. We shared a sleeper cabin on the train. His phone buzzed continually. He looked strung out.
Fatkullin occupied an unusual position that was both inside and outside Ukraine’s military-defense structures. When he wasn’t on missions, he attended Air Force meetings in Kyiv. His unit was classified as “experimental aviation,” but he seemed to receive little institutional support and he had a heavy administrative burden. Raising funds for the new plane had consumed much of his time since I’d met him. The night we took the train, he still hadn’t amassed the full amount to purchase the plane outright. Since the war in Iran had started, he was also fielding calls from officials in the U.A.E., asking him to bring his team to the region to help with Shahed attacks from Iran. (He was unsure whether he had the time to help the Emiratis, but he was considering the offer.)
Compounding his anxieties, Fatkullin had recently undergone a troubling eye test. An ophthalmologist had noticed some slight damage to his right retina, possibly caused by exposure to the bright flashes of exploding Shaheds while wearing night-vision goggles. Fatkullin also worried about his team. When he was away, Slipkan became the lead pilot, and in Fatkullin’s view Slipkan sometimes flew too close to the drones. The Antonov kept coming back to base peppered with shrapnel holes. Fatkullin shared with me a recent video, which showed that the fuel tank on the plane had been hit again.
Fatkullin wondered if Slipkan’s aggressive flying was connected to the death of his son. Slipkan, he said, was “all in, all the time.” As self-confident as Fatkullin was, he flew conservatively on drone-hunting missions, because he felt responsible for his crew’s safety. If a nighttime landing was becoming too difficult, he said, he was happy to take another turn and try again. But Slipkan preferred to land on his first try. (He told me, “I don’t have Timur’s standards of elegance.”) After one incident in which Slipkan was at the controls and lost sight of a drone that had passed directly underneath the plane, Gusak had called Fatkullin, saying that “it was suicide” to fly like that.
Fatkullin’s work with the aviation unit also caused tension in his family. When he was with his men, he could appear cocksure and old-fashioned in his attitudes toward women. Over lunch one day at the lodge, in front of his crew, I mentioned that I had bought my wife flowers on Mother’s Day. Fatkullin told me that he’d stopped buying flowers for his wife, since they didn’t last. He then added that, in any case, when it came to women, “you have to be a little bit cruel—otherwise it doesn’t work at all.” But in the confessional space of the train cabin, he admitted that he found it difficult to balance his work with a marriage that he treasured. He noted that he’d found wisdom in Esther Perel’s book “Mating in Captivity.”
After the train trip, I returned to Ukraine and had dinner at Fatkullin’s elegant home, on the outskirts of Kyiv. The house was full of flowers. Valeriya Guzema, who returned from Spain not long after Russia’s ground assault on Kyiv failed, is a stylish, delicately built woman in her mid-thirties. She and her husband sat entwined as they ate. Guzema told me, half smiling, that in the first few months of the unit’s operations he came home only when there was a problem with his plane. (They see each other more now, she added.) Guzema was juggling a lot herself: she oversaw a business with a hundred and fifty employees, and was taking care of the couple’s children—they now had three.
As Fatkullin related some story of derring-do over dinner, she interrupted him and said—with what I perceived as a mixture of admiration and dread—“Sometimes I think you forget you are human.” He smiled and went on with the anecdote. Nevertheless, the couple had maintained a connection through aviation. Guzema and Fatkullin occasionally fly in formation together, in different planes. Fatkullin told me that flying next to his wife was like dancing—“a way of talking without talking.”
Up in the air on the moonless night in March, Gusak positioned the Shahed in his sights. In the left-hand pilot’s seat, Fatkullin had loosened his seat belt so that he could fly while turning his body to look out of his window at the target with his night-vision goggles. Slipkan instructed Gusak, on a radio, to hold fire. The Antonov was flying over a highway, and they didn’t want the Shahed to crash onto the road.
Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds. A stream of orange tracers rained from the minigun. After a few bursts of gunfire, a small plume of black smoke tailed out behind the Shahed, and it began losing altitude. The crew expected it to explode, but it glided into a field beneath the Antonov without detonating—a surprise for a farmer the next morning. Inside the plane, there was no jubilation. After the successful kill, Gusak spent a few minutes tidying up his work station, collecting round casings into a burlap bag.
The crew members looked for their next target. Ground control had instructed them to search for a nearby Shahed that had just disappeared from radar. The drone was soon spotted on the thermal-imaging camera, flying at an altitude of only a hundred and thirty feet. Attacking a drone flying at such low altitude is delicate. Fatkullin told me that during this kind of engagement he stays locked on the target: “Whatever the drone does, I do.” Of course, if a low-flying Shahed moves lower and the Antonov follows, it’s “a problem,” since the plane might crash. Slipkan monitored the altimeter. When Fatkullin was in a focussed state and flying slowly, there was also the possibility of stalling, which was dangerous so close to the ground. If Slipkan felt that Fatkullin was at risk of a stall, he placed his hand gently on Fatkullin’s hand—a sign to increase throttle.
The Antonov soon drew alongside the Shahed, and Gusak opened fire. The drone let out its cigarette trail of death, and tumbled to the earth, again without exploding. Only after the fourth and final kill of the night did a fireball fill the air. The flash briefly turned the plane’s interior a dazzling yellow. We watched as the mangled Shahed crashed and continued exploding for several minutes. Fatkullin noted over the radio that the drone’s warhead must have contained cluster munitions. It was only the second Shahed that Fatkullin had seen behaving that way after being shot down. Gusak had hit the fourth drone from about a thousand feet away, which was near the limit of his range. I was extremely glad that we were not closer, but when we landed to refuel at a military airbase, at nearly 1 a.m., Fatkullin seemed almost disappointed that there had not been more drama. “It used to be more rock and roll,” he said. “We’d go close. But you’ve got kids, and I’ve got a bunch of people in the plane.”
When we arrived back at the airfield, it was nearly 5 a.m. The atmosphere after landing was loose and collegial. Fatkullin told me that he was often at his happiest at moments like this. “You feel clean inside, you have integrity, you have done something useful,” he said. The men were freezing cold after hours in the open cabin. Slipkan invited the crew into the bunker, where he opened a bottle of champagne and poured it into coffee mugs. He and Fatkullin clinked mugs. Someone said, “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine!”), to which the pilots responded, “Heroiam slava!” (“Glory to the heroes!”) Sleep was still hours away.
On the Western Front in the First World War, the trenches were a hellscape: rats, mud, mechanized slaughter. The battle in the skies was no safer, but the experience of air combat was palpably different. Planes were a relatively recent invention, and fighter pilots were a glamorous new species. As Samuel Hynes writes in “The Unsubstantial Air,” his history of American fliers in the conflict, “being a pilot was something like being a college athlete, something like being a fraternity man at a house party that never ended, a bit like being a young tourist in an interesting foreign country with a few of your friends. Flying was fun—it was the only kind of war-making that was.”
Advances in technology have made the battlefields of Ukraine in 2026 a nightmare comparable to the trenches of Picardy and Flanders in 1916. Attack drones that are connected to controllers by twenty-mile-long fibre-optic cables—a hack to prevent signal-jamming by the enemy—have reconfigured the conflict. In the east of the country, there is no longer a single front line but rather a wide death belt where small groups of soldiers hide from attack drones in holes, and are resupplied by unmanned quadcopters. There are now few medevac troops—if a soldier is hurt, he is increasingly likely to be rescued by a robot. A severe injury is often terminal. An estimated hundred thousand Ukrainians, and some three hundred thousand Russians, have died in the fighting.
High above and far away from the ground war, Fatkullin’s crew has found a joyful way to join the battle. The Ukrainian military recently gave Fatkullin and Slipkan an award for “outstanding bravery.” Gusak and another crew member, who cannot be named for security reasons, were also awarded medals for valor. One of Fatkullin’s favorite videos shows Gusak, wearing baggy jeans, shambling forward like a recalcitrant teen-ager to receive his medal from a stiff-backed general.
The crew takes self-conscious delight in its work. Every flight is recorded on video. In one of Fatkullin’s Instagram posts from the beginning of the year, he published a video in which footage of Shahed strikes, skydives, and motorbike stunts was spliced together with moody shots of him with his wife, his kids, and his friends. The caption reads, “Reflecting on 2025. Real life rarely looks cinematic until it’s already memory.”
Most of the video content that Aerotim films is not posted to Instagram but shared among the men for their own pleasure. Fatkullin and his team are also making a feature documentary about their unit. Perhaps the film will be released, or perhaps it will remain a private record of Aerotim’s exploits. Fatkullin also insisted to me that the film can’t be finished until the war is over. “Maybe there will be some developments,” he said. “Maybe there will be a tragedy.”
By the end of March, Fatkullin had secured the funds to buy the used two-seater aerobatics plane. The vender had flown it most of the way to Ukraine from Western Europe. Even if Fatkullin could quickly obtain the additional parts he needed—the machine gun, the rotating thermal-imaging camera—it would still take his crew at least a month to ready the aircraft for combat. Fatkullin was impatient to start using what he called his “new platform.” Shahed attacks had dramatically increased in the spring.
The four drone kills I witnessed from the Antonov brought the crew’s total to a hundred and seventy-five. Within a week, the number had raced past two hundred. (It has now surpassed two hundred and fifty.) In April, the unit began flying more often during daylight hours as the Russians varied the times at which they launched barrages. My phone often buzzed with a video from a recent mission.
On the morning of Good Friday, April 3rd, Fatkullin sent me a screenshot of his radar. Dozens of red Shahed icons swarmed over the center of Ukraine. Most of them were heading toward Kyiv. President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Vladimir Putin had been negotiating an Easter ceasefire, but the Russians had launched one of their largest attacks yet. Fatkullin’s crew had been in the sky all night and had shot down six Shaheds. “Just landed,” Fatkullin texted at 6 a.m., Kyiv time. “We almost killed ourselves.”
Fatkullin told me that, during the flight, an armed P1-Sun interceptor drone had failed to launch from the Antonov’s under-wing bracket. When the plane landed at the base, the P1-Sun had finally dislodged, then toppled onto the runway next to the plane. Fatkullin saw the drone fall, and expected an explosion, but it had not detonated. Slipkan volunteered to approach the P1-Sun and pick it up. Fatkullin sent me a video of Slipkan, beaming, with the disarmed drone in his hands.
As we exchanged texts, central Ukraine remained under heavy attack. Fatkullin told me that Shaheds were “incoming” above them as they refuelled. “Never seen this kind of daytime activity,” he wrote. I asked if he and the crew would fly another mission, but he didn’t answer. The Antonov was already in the air. ♦