'Every drone that hits them is payback for killing Oleh'

Askold Krushelnycky visits the concealed base of the 'Barney Unit' in eastern Ukraine - created by Stepan Barna following the death on the front line of his older brother in April 2023

Many soldiers will insist that killing their enemies is not personal. But when Stepan Barna's suicide drone unit takes Russian soldiers' lives, he does not disguise his feeling that every killing is a very personal payback for the death of his brother last year.

Stepan and his older brother, Oleh, were both well-known Ukrainian politicians long before Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Stepan had been the governor of the Ternopil region in the country’s west. Oleh had been a member of the Ukrainian parliament. He gained notoriety in 2015 when he grabbed the then prime minister, Arseniy Yatseniuk, whose politics he disagreed with, while Yatseniuk was addressing the parliament, and dragged him off the podium.

Both brothers joined the Ukrainian army days after the invasion started and took part in some of the war’s fiercest battles. Oleh was one day short of his 55th birthday when he was killed in action near the town of Vuhledar in the eastern region of Donetsk in April 2023.

Stepan says: “I realised a year ago that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were going to transform, enormously, the nature of this conflict, and that drone warfare was fast evolving into one of the dominant battlefield factors.” Although the Ukrainian military, compensating for Russia’s overwhelming superiority in numbers of troops and weapons, had started experimenting with and utilising drones after Putin illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, many still regarded UAVs as almost toy-like and insignificant early on in this invasion.

Last year, Stepan experienced first-hand how devastating drones can be. He and a group of his comrades from the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade, in which he serves as a senior sergeant, were defending a location near Bakhmut in the Donetsk region.