The masked face of what appears to be a Ukrainian soldier stares directly into the camera. He shouts a few directions at a comrade behind him then throws a drone into the sky. The roaring propellers then take you on unprecedented aerial journey.What follows is a surreal perspective into what the modern battlefields of Ukraine actually look like, from a drone's eye view.Bombed-out fields dotted with what appear to be fox holes and artillery explosions litter the grim landscape. The flatness of the Ukrainian plains brings to mind images of WWI, especially how the leafless trees and the dying grass mimic trench scenes from Belgium or France.
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Then the drone flies over an industrial area, which appears to be the Donetsk airport—the site of fierce off and on fighting between Ukrainian forces and allegedly Russian backed insurgents associated with the Donetsk People's Republic.It's easy to think the sheer destruction looks peaceful from the sky: the son is shining on a clear day and the traces of explosions in roofs seem like the trademarks of dead battles. But at 2:57 of the video tracer fire is seen whistling by the drone. The enemy has spotted the surveillance weapon and are trying to destroy it.In the end, it's just one more example of how the UAV is entering modern war on the side of armies and insurgents, providing valuable surveillance in the short term.But in the long term these war machines give us historical records in images, of what the battlefield really looked like.