This can involve crawling through a snowy minefield, holding a metal detector in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Vasyl has a way of landing the drone-but then he has to make his way to it, to salvage the gadget and the information it has recorded. The drone then starts swerving haphazardly, cutting figure eights and zigzags in the air. Sometimes, when Vasyl is flying a drone, the Russians manage to jam his radio signal. When Vasyl unpacked the parcel, he cried because he saw the care that his friend had put into it: he included the best available battery, the most capacious memory card, and backups of essential accessories. An émigré entrepreneur whom he knew donated a replacement. In the first weeks of the war, two of Vasyl’s drones were shot down. As the Ukrainians open fire, the drone camera continues working, and Vasyl keeps transmitting information back to base: “Fifty metres north,” “Twenty metres south,” and-finally, when the missiles are hitting within ten metres of the object-“Repeat!” until the target is destroyed. When he spots, say, a tank, he taps the screen to get the coördinates of the object and transmits these to an artillery unit. He flies them behind enemy lines, looking at what the camera on his drone can see on the screen of his cell phone. His drones are now used to locate targets. Before the war, he liked to take bird’s-eye-or, as he calls them, angel’s-eye-photographs of the city, particularly the Law University, with aerial drones. Vasyl was already at the front, where, for the past year, he has served as a member of an aerial-intelligence unit. Fortunately, Vasyl’s wife was at work when that missile hit. Half the windows in the apartment shattered. He woke up his wife by saying, “It seems the war has started.”Ī few weeks later, a Russian Grad rocket hit the ground near their building. He looked out the window-they had a great panoramic view-and saw the skies turning red near Piatykhatky, at the northeastern edge of the city. So he was already awake, in the kitchen, on February 24, 2022, when he heard explosions. Vasyl liked to get up at the crack of dawn and do a twenty-five-kilometre bike loop in the woods. They saved to buy an apartment in a new nine-story building on the western edge of Kharkiv, overlooking a forest. He and his wife, who is also a lawyer, are strivers. More reporting by Masha Gessen from Ukraine. He is going to drag your ass into court, and you’ll end up paying back double.” See my lawyer? He is mean and greedy and charges by the hour. Vasyl’s clients would then say, “You don’t want to do this. Once Vasyl arrived, the regulators proceeded from the harassment portion of the visit to the extortion stage, offering to “settle” the matter for a sum of money. Often, representatives from a regulatory agency would show up at a client’s office, ostensibly for an inspection, and the client would call Vasyl. He likes to say that he fought government overreach. At the time, he was an assistant professor of forensics at the National Law University, in Kharkiv, and a lawyer in private practice. In a picture that he took on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vasyl has a chevron mustache, a neat barbershop cut-close on the sides, paintbrush-thick on top. Vasyl Bilous’s last name means “white mustache.” His actual mustache is dark brown with a hint of gray.
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