A 15-year-old drone pilot spotted a column of Russian military vehicles approaching Kyiv and thus helped prevent the invasion of Ukraine’s capital by the orcs – a “very, very scary” experience in his own words. The column, one of Russia’s biggest bound for Kyiv, had invaded Ukraine from Belarus and was moving on the Zhytomyr Highway. Thanks to the boy, it was stopped mere 40 kilometers from the destination and will move no more.
A few days into the full-scale war, territorial defense forces turned to Andriy Pokrasa because they needed the GPS coordinates of the column for targeting, and he was the only person in the region experienced with drones. The military provided information on where approximately the column could be, and the boy’s task was to find the exact coordinates and report them to the territorial defense.
After dark, Andriy, accompanied by his father, took his drone to a nearby field – not to annoy their neighbors who feared that flying the copter could make them targets. And he did manage to find the convoy because one of its trucks had the lights on for a long time. It turned out that the enemy was as close as two kilometers from them (their town’s name is not disclosed for security reasons). Using a social media app, his father passed the GPS coordinates and photos over to a territorial defense unit, and Ukrainian artillery made short work of the uninvited guests.
Asked if he was not afraid, Andriy replied that he was but could not do it any other way. Generally speaking, he is a typical teenager who likes to skateboard, jump on a trampoline, and ride his bike. However, piloting drones is his favorite hobby. Afraid of heights, he became hooked on looking at the world from above and flew his first mini-drone every day last summer before school began.
After the success in pinpointing the Russian convoy, Andriy continued to help spot Russian military movements using a bigger drone with a longer range supplied by the Ukrainian forces. His mother worried when her husband and son went out at night to look for Russian soldiers. She eventually took him to Poland to finish his ninth school year, although she said he wanted to stay in Ukraine and keep helping.
According to Yuriy Kasyanov, who is in charge of the unmanned reconnaissance section within Ukraine’s armed forces, many Ukrainian teenagers had been contributing, not only with drones but also by relaying information collected by watching Russian troops from their homes and vehicles. “They feel themselves free people in a free land so that’s why they wanted to be part of it,” he was quoted by Global News as saying.
Source: Global News
