Small-scale battles A night in a Ukrainian drone squad bunker

The armoured car's bumpy high-speed journey comes to a halt, and the Guardian team is dropped off in the November darkness, where two Ukrainian soldiers await.

- Dan Sabbagh

The armored car's bumpy high-speed journey comes to a halt, and the Guardian team is dropped off in the November darkness, where two Ukrainian soldiers await. Using hard-to-detect red and green torchlight, they follow an unmarked trail across rough fields, punctuated by the sounds of frontline shelling, until a concealed opening appears. Inside, a specialist drone crew is at work.

Nearby, a drone flight of a few minutes away, is the frontline town of Toretsk, where the Russian invaders have been gaining territory using surges of infantry and ceaseless artillery. Underground in the surprisingly warm bunker is a team of four, all members of Ukraine's Khyzhak brigade of police officers turned soldiers.

To reward its best drone squads, Ukraine's military introduced a points system in June. To an outsider it appears chilling: points are scored for Russian soldiers recorded killed or wounded and for tanks, guns and other equipment destroyed.

Luiza, a brigade spokesperson, says for every Russian soldier wounded, four points are added. If they are "eliminated", it is six. If a Russian 152mm artillery piece is destroyed, it is 40 points, and half that if it is simply damaged.

"Collected points can be exchanged for drones," she adds, so an FPV (first-person view) drone is available for "one to three points depending on the functionality", considered by the brigade as a boon when so many drones in the Ukrainian army are paid for by soldiers or by fundraising through family and friends.

But in the bunker it is not a game - the deadly threat in the background is one reminder that it is too serious for that. The drone squad's primary goal is to halt the remorseless Russian advance, though in Toretsk, and across the eastern front, the battlefield situation for Ukraine remains fraught.