Sending ‘gifts’ to Russian soldiers: The punk rocker making drones in a Kyiv basement

This story is part of the May 10 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

It’s Friday night and I have a meeting with an old rocker who has a new mission in life: making drones. Oleksandr Pipa, one of Ukraine’s original punk rockers, had watched the initial Russian incursion from his window in Kyiv before rushing to help set up checkpoints and medical tents in his suburb for soldiers being brought back from the rapidly shifting front lines. Now he’s found a new role in life as, each evening, he and fellow musician Anton Chernysh get together to make drones.

My wife, Sylvie Le Clezio, a documentary filmmaker and photographer, and I tag along as they head to a secret location in Kyiv. “Drones are very expensive; that is why we have started designing our own version of the drones that we use for surveillance and also to deliver some ‘presents’,” Pipa says with a grin. Many Ukrainians involved in making drones call the explosives they attach to them “presents” or “gifts” for Russian soldiers.

Once there, we go to the basement, where the two musicians have set up an extraordinary drone factory, complete with 3D-printing machines provided by a Ukrainian company, models of various drones and anti-drone guns. “This basement is our main research laboratory,” Chernysh says. “All the groups where we have fighters, volunteers and so on are doing almost the same thing as us, but this lab is the heart of inventions, which we later share with others.”

Chernysh, 27, is a mild-mannered IT consultant and musician. He’s using the technology smarts he developed in his career to help the war effort. In this basement factory, he shows us the workstations he’s built for anyone who wants to help, such as Pipa, who comes along for several hours each evening. Chernysh had expertise in IT before the war while Pipa has simply learnt on the job under Chernysh’s guidance.

We mention to them that it’s a Friday night, and before the war began musicians like themselves might be performing. “I would normally be playing in a pub or drinking some beer, but now I cannot afford to have fun,” Chernysh says. “It’s a war and I’m fighting for our survival ... Every single Ukrainian is fighting for survival. But we often also have something personal.”

He tells us that his parents’ home was invaded in the early hours of the war. About 500 Russian military vehicles stopped in their village and fought their neighbours for one-and-a-half months. “It went from being a peaceful village in Ukraine to one occupied by Russian soldiers,” he says.

He quit his job that day. “I could not sit in front of a computer attending long calls and meetings with customers because I knew what was going on outside,” he says. He began transporting elderly people from Kyiv towards western Ukraine, and because he had a permit to leave the country, he began going to Poland to buy supplies for the army. He would purchase things, like body armour, in Poland, deliver them over the border to Lviv, then other volunteers took them to Kyiv.

Anton Chernysh quit his job as an IT consultant to design drones soon after the war started.

He tells us about an old lady whom one of his volunteers met while making deliveries to a village that the Russians had recently left; she was crying and wanting to kiss the feet of the volunteers. “She told the story of how 14 Russians came to her apartment, killed her husband and threw him from the window. Then they raped the granddaughter and did the same to the daughter, and they made her watch this,” Chernysh says. “That is why she was saying, ‘Give me some weapons, give me something, I have nothing to live for now and I want to join you.’ ”

Citizen Army signs on

Chernysh says that when Russia decided to invade Ukraine, it did not factor in Ukraine’s army of civilians. “At the beginning it was [the Russian army’s] role to come to Kyiv, to kill [President Volodymyr] Zelensky and be done,” he says. “But there was a huge misunderstanding from their side. They are not fighting against the Ukrainian army, the Ukrainian president or the Ukrainian parliament – they are fighting against the whole population of Ukraine.”

Chernysh wanted to work out what he could contribute to the volunteer army and how he could be involved. Instead of using his body, though, he realised he could use his mind. “I started making drones and the release mechanisms for them and collecting requests from the army at the front,” he says. “I started providing whatever I could to help them from a technical perspective.”

This basement has been fitted with a wall of 3D printers producing parts for drones and for the mechanisms that Chernysh has designed, which are attached to the drones and release the bombs. Some of these drones are for reconnaissance, while others carry what Chernysh calls “the candies” – explosives – that the Ukrainian army drops on Russian positions.

Working alongside Chernysh in this basement, Pipa says he’s watched footage of Russian soldiers reacting when they see the drones. “They hear this noise, they start to panic, it’s like a chaos,” he says. “They try to hide. They don’t know what explosives it may have. Sometimes they are regular surveillance drones but sometimes they carry something.”

The author (right) and Oleksandr Pipa, a punk rocker who now works with Chernysh.

Chernysh proudly shows us various drones. We ask how he feels about preparing machines designed to kill people. “At the very beginning, I had bad feelings,” he says. “I felt sorry for those guys, but after a while I found myself no longer feeling any regret.”

This desensitisation was something we encountered a lot. “It’s a rule of war: they are not people, they are invaders,” he says. “Either we eliminate them or they kill us. It’s that simple: kill or be killed.”

We ask him what Russian soldiers would think if they saw one of these drones approaching. “If you’re a Russian soldier, and you see it coming,” he says, “it is the last thing you see coming.”

Chernysh and Pipa receive requests from the front line as to which types of drones are needed – reconnaissance, medical or attack – and then go through the orders, building whatever is requested. Tonight, the two are unpacking parts, welding and wiring all kinds of drones. The range is extraordinary. In one corner are “kamikaze” drones: the explosives go on the bottom and there are triggers to fire up the detonator. They’re called kamikaze drones as they’ll also blow up with their packages. Once Chernysh and Pipa make these drones, they hand them over to soldiers who attach the explosives.

On another bench are surveillance drones, originally made for film and television production, but their excellent cameras and zooms have made them desirable for the war effort. They also have altitude and obstacle sensors, which allow Ukrainian soldiers to see the position and movements of Russian soldiers; at night, the sensors can also pick up the heat of a Russian body.

On yet another bench is a do-it-yourself drone kit. The two musicians use fundraised money to buy all the components from China, or from inside Ukraine, and one of these little DIY drones can carry up to two kilograms and fly two kilometres. They may look like toys, but Chernysh says if a tank is hit in the right spot – particularly if the drone is flown into the tank while the turret is open – they can destroy it.

In another corner of this basement is a Russian reconnaissance drone that Chernysh souvenired from the front line when Russian soldiers fled. He studies this drone with great interest; he and other Ukrainians I met making drones always valued the chance to study the enemy’s weapons up close. Drones are important in this war, Chernysh says, because they save lives. “When we have a drone, we do not have to use people to find out what is out there,” he says, “and it is better for us to lose the drone than it is to lose a human in the war.”

Pipa echoes this view. “We can sacrifice the drones, [but] our soldiers’ lives are important, and that is why the more drones we have, the more human lives will be saved.” It can also give someone the chance to surrender. In this war of drones, there is now a protocol understood by both sides. If a Ukrainian drone comes across a group of Russian soldiers, it will try to fire at them or drop explosives. But if it comes across a solitary Russian soldier, it will try to capture him instead.

“It feels important that we are contributing to winning this war,” says Pipa.

“Drones can be used to [get] the enemy to surrender,” Chernysh explains. “If [Russian soldiers] see a drone that goes like this” – he wiggles his flat palm from side to side – “it means, ‘Surrender: immediately drop your weapon, lift up your hands and follow the drone.’ The drone will take them to a safe place where they will be picked up by a Ukrainian soldier, and you will still be alive and stay alive.” If the soldier tries instead to shoot down the drone or to run away, the drone will fire.

What’s going on in this basement is not the reality that either musician imagined for himself a couple of years ago. But making drones makes Pipa feel like he’s involved. “It feels important that we are contributing to winning this war,” he says. “It’s Friday night, and usually us musicians should be performing or rehearsing, having fun, but we are making these devices because we hate war.” He’s someone who likes to joke and have a laugh, he says, “but when there is a war, I can’t do that: I have to be serious, and I hate that. We need to push out these invaders from our country and [see] their empire collapse, and then we can get back to our normal life – to playing gigs.”

Up until now, Pipa has been a lifelong pacifist. As he sits working on a drone, he tells us a story from his childhood. “The last time I went fishing – it was in fact the first and last time I went fishing! – I was six years old,” he begins. “I caught the fish, but I felt sorry for the fish and I let it go.” He says that he hates hunting; he doesn’t like people killing animals just for fun. “I am a very peaceful person, but what I am doing now is producing devices that will kill the invaders,” he continues, “and I feel quite good about that because they are invaders. They came here to kill us, so it is either them or us.

“When we’re talking about killing Russian soldiers, I would not use the word ‘killing’,” he argues. “The military terminology is more appropriate. The military never use the word ‘killing’ but rather use ‘eliminate’, because when it comes to the military, it is a hard job, and you don’t think about them as human beings. You have to destroy them, and that’s it.” ’

Pipa realised before this invasion that his view of Russians and the friendships he’d built over years of performing were deteriorating. “I had my mind changed before the war; I thought I had a lot of good friends, musicians, we used to perform together,” he says. “I thought they felt the same as I do about the collapse of the Soviet Union, but gradually I saw them change. Once Russia became richer, with oil prices going higher, they were coming back to this natural state, this state of feeling superior.”

We heard many variations of this sentiment when travelling around Ukraine, that while Ukrainians and Russians had for some time thought of themselves as colleagues or even friends of sorts, the power dynamic between the two countries had shifted more and more dramatically in the lead-up to the war and overshadowed many relationships.

According to Pipa, that’s not a coincidence. “Millions of Ukrainians have finally had their eyes opened,” he says. “Russians invested billions in their cultural expansions about brainwashing, how Russia is attractive, and how a lot of people want to live in Russia. They claimed a lot of Ukrainians had felt that way, and how a lot of Russian politicians were performing quite well here. They had a lot of supporters here. Now it’s over.”

Chernysh was one of those people who had been made to feel lesser by the Russian propaganda, a feeling that extended not just throughout Ukraine but worldwide. He says that before the invasion, when he was travelling, and people asked him where he was from, he would say, “I am from Ukraine,” and they would reply, “Is that the same as Russia?” He says he doesn’t get asked that any more.

“I feel much more proud than before,” he says. “I was, to be honest, even trying to hide the fact that I was from Ukraine, because it used to be considered a bad country ... But now I am so proud of saying I am from Ukraine.”

Students join the fight

In another part of Kyiv, an engineering lecturer is teaching his former students how to turn agricultural drones into “gifts” for the Russians. I drive across town to meet Maxim Sheremet, a 27-year-old engineering graduate who has set himself up in an old warehouse. Along with scores of his students, he’s begun making attack drones. The students ask farmers to donate agricultural drones that are normally used for spraying pesticides, then spend their nights turning them into military drones. When I visit the warehouse, the students are attaching cages to the bottom of the drones in which soldiers can pack explosives. Or, in the words of Sheremet, “This is where we put the presents for the Russians.”

Maxim Sheremet, a 27-year-old engineering graduate.Credit: @maxim_sheremet/Instagram

To walk around this warehouse, nestled in an otherwise standard suburban shopping strip, is a remarkable experience. Inside is a smorgasbord of flying devices, from kamikaze drones the size of watermelons to drones almost two metres wide that look like gliders. “We’re helping our military by creating these birds for different applications in the army,” Sheremet says.

Sheremet has devoted his new life to making these drones. He has convinced as many as 100 former and current students and colleagues to join his drone roster. Teams work from 10 in the morning until 10 at night, with each group playing a part in the production line, from adapting the agricultural drones for attack, to building cages. And it’s not just his engineering students and fellow lecturers; everyday civilians “with a good sense of aeronautics” have also joined the fight. He makes the point that his team is not particularly warlike by background or personality. “A lot of people who work here actually cannot shoot a rifle, but they can do something with their hands,” he says. “Some of them are not even yet 18 years of age.”

Despite his own young age, Sheremet is something of an engineering superstar in Ukraine. He not only lectures students, some of whom are older than him, but he is chief executive of a Ukrainian company. For several years, he’s been studying a specialist area: how to fly a drone without a GPS. Now, as part of the war effort, he’s putting all his skills and smarts towards helping his country, attacking what he calls “the pigs in the trenches”. Sheremet has set up this laboratory so the army can order online, or come into the warehouse and choose their product. This takes off-the-shelf shopping to a new level. “We have an online order form but 90 per cent of our sales are face-to-face. Friends tell friends that Maxim Sheremet is creating cool drones, and the word goes around, then the army comes in here. Guys come into my lab and say, ‘Maxim, we need drones for these tasks.’ ”

Maxim Sheremet: “A lot of people who work here actually cannot shoot a rifle, but they can do something with their hands.” Credit: @maxim_sheremet/Instagram

Like Anton Chernysh and Oleksandr Pipa’s operation, Sheremet’s has different drones for different needs. Some of the drones here are for surveillance and research instead of death; in this case, the priority is the quality of the camera and its ability to swivel in any direction. Some are designed as first-aid responders and have a medical kit attached. Some are designed to fly into buildings or people for instant destruction, the so-called kamikaze drones.

As for the attack drones, they’re fashioned to carry bombs that can destroy a tank or cause maximum damage to soldiers in a trench.

Sheremet says this is “the world’s biggest war of drones”. The team in this warehouse are students he was teaching when the war broke out. One of the classes he taught before the war was on how to create drones. For fun, once the students had built their own drones, he would take them to a park so they could race them to see whose was the fastest. They hope one day to get back to drone racing. But before that can happen, the students in this warehouse have one very clear and focused mission: to force Vladimir Putin’s soldiers from their country.

Lives put on hold

The friendship between Pipa and Chernysh has been forged over many years, through both being musicians around Kyiv, but now they are joined by a different bond. From this basement, they are both fighting the Russian army. Pipa looks to the world like a wild-haired musician who longs to be on stage; his presence here is as incongruous as it would be to see Australian musician Nick Cave sitting in a Sydney or Melbourne basement making weapons of war.

But we learn from Pipa and Chernysh that for them, and so many other Ukrainians, the lives they thought they needed to have must be put on hold until they rid themselves of what they regard as the cancer of Russia’s occupation of one-fifth of their country.

They still exude all the charm, charisma and fun of musicians, but when the subject turns to Russians, they become focused and ruthless. Nothing highlights this more strongly than when we ask Pipa if he has a message for Russians, who were once a people he performed for and shared vodka with. His anger is clear as he says in Russian, “There is no vodka here. Go home and f--- yourselves.”

Edited extract from A Bunker in Kyiv (HarperCollins, $35), by John Lyons, out now.

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