“In the best blockbusters you wouldn’t see this”: Ukrainian soldier on fighting off a Russian drone from a moving Humvee

The soldier, known by the call sign Tatarin, is part of a Ukrainian unit that recovers damaged battlefield vehicles on the Pokrovsk front. The work aims to keep the vehicles out of Russian hands and return them to service, ArmyInform said. Tatarin told ArmyInform that his team has recovered everything from armored personnel carriers to tanks.

Tatarin said he spent more than 20 years working in a mine in Donetsk Oblast. He is from Myrnohrad, lived in the same place his whole life, and stayed there until 2024, when he joined the army.

"I'd like to go back, but there's nothing left there. Everything is smashed," he said, adding that he is now fighting for his own home.

After the training center, he was assigned to the 155th Separate Mechanized Brigade, where he now commands a technical reconnaissance squad. When an order comes down, his team drives out ahead in a US-made HMMWV, known as the Humvee, to see how a damaged vehicle can be hooked and how another vehicle can reach it, then plans the run before the recovery vehicle goes in.

A mission through the minefields

One of the hardest runs was for a damaged French VAB armored personnel carrier, left in an area Ukrainian units were already withdrawing from. It had to be taken out so Russian forces would not get it. Four men went: Tatarin, Did from Dnipro, Blogger from Zhytomyr, and Patron from Ternopil Oblast.

They reached the VAB, but their Humvee hit a mine nearby, and the men suffered blast concussions and other injuries. A wheel was torn off, and Tatarin drove them to a treeline on the remaining three, he said. Then a Russian first-person-view (FPV) drone found them. They had just jumped out and started moving away when it struck the vehicle, he said. It burned, along with their radios.

There were no Ukrainian positions left nearby. Tatarin said they walked more than 10 kilometers to get out, through minefields and tripwires. "We were caught between two fires. We walked blind," he said. With no cover, they ran across the open stretches. The treelines had been destroyed, and the sky was filled with drones, leaving them unable to tell whose was whose.

Eventually, they found a beaten path and heard voices—Ukrainian infantry from a neighboring unit, weapons already charged. Tatarin is from Donetsk Oblast and speaks mostly Russian, and his comrades told him to say nothing so the group would not be taken for the enemy, he said. They called out that they were from the 155th. The infantry then passed their identity back by radio. Their own brigade, it turned out, had already been searching for them, including with drones.

The neighboring unit collected them the next day in another Humvee, and another FPV drone came at that vehicle. Tatarin and a comrade with the call sign Vovchyk fired back from the moving Humvee, Vovchyk with an automatic rifle and Tatarin with a pump-action shotgun. The drone detonated about 30 meters away. "In the best blockbusters you wouldn't see this," he said. "It was hard. War is war." They reached a safer area, where medics were waiting. The main thing is that everyone came out alive, he said.