Driving under drone nets

Thursday 26 February 2026

There is a peculiar stillness to roads near the front line — a stillness that does not arise from peace but from calculation. One drives not freely but conditionally. Every metre is negotiated with the sky.

The first time I drove beneath anti-drone netting, it felt faintly absurd. Great swathes of camouflage mesh — strung from poles, trees and ruined buildings — hung over stretches of road like agricultural shade cloth in some dystopian vineyard. But this was no agrarian improvisation. This was survival engineering. The nets were there because the sky now belongs to small machines.

In the early months of Russia’s full-scale invasion, artillery defined danger. One listened for outgoing fire, waited for incoming rounds and judged distance by sound and instinct. Now — in 2026 — the most intimate threat is the first-person-view drone. It does not announce itself with the grandeur of artillery. It hunts. It selects. It follows.

Driving under nets is therefore an admission: you are prey.

The mesh overhead is intended to break up visual signatures — to deny a drone’s camera a clean silhouette of a vehicle. It interferes with targeting algorithms and complicates the human operator’s judgement. It buys seconds. In this war, seconds are currency.

But the nets are imperfect. They sag. They tear. Wind displaces them. And, critically, they do not cover the entire road. One drives in segments of relative obscurity and then emerges into naked exposure — stretches where the sky opens above like a lid being removed.

The sensation of passing from under netting into open air is visceral. The hands tighten on the steering wheel. The mind performs involuntary geometry: Where are the tree lines? What would be the likely launch positions? How quickly could a drone descend? Could I accelerate sufficiently? Should I accelerate at all, or would speed attract attention?

This is not panic. Panic paralyses. It is a state of sustained anticipatory reasoning.

Inside the vehicle there is no dramatic soundtrack. There is the hum of the engine, the rattle of loose equipment and the occasional crackle of radio communications. Yet the imagination is loud. One pictures the drone operator — somewhere behind Russian lines — wearing virtual reality goggles, seeing what the drone sees. One imagines one’s own vehicle framed in that rectangular display.

And there is a deeply modern humiliation in this vulnerability. The predator is not a pilot risking his own life, nor an artilleryman exposed to counter-battery fire. It is a distant operator — perhaps in a basement, perhaps in a trench — who risks nothing immediate. The asymmetry alters the psychology of movement. You are exposed; he is insulated.

The nets themselves have become part of the landscape — as characteristic of eastern and southern Ukraine now as sunflowers once were. They hang across logistics routes feeding cities such as Kramatorsk and Pokrovsk, where civilian life continues in defiance of proximity to the line of contact. Under those nets travel ambulances, supply trucks, journalists and occasionally the civilian car whose driver has misjudged how close he wishes to live to history.

I recall one particular journey late in the afternoon. The light was poor — a diffuse grey that flattened depth perception. Nets above me oscillated in the wind. In places they were doubled or tripled, suggesting prior strikes. In other places they were patched hastily with fresh material. The road surface was uneven, scarred by near-misses.

Halfway along an exposed section, someone in the passenger seat remarked, very quietly, “If they see us now, we will not know until it is too late.”

This is the defining feature of the drone age: the compression of warning time. Traditional warfare afforded gradients of escalation. A whistling shell, the distant thud of launch, the rumour of aircraft overhead. A drone can be silent until it is final.

Under the nets, paradoxically, there is a measure of psychological relief. The mesh overhead, even if fragile, feels like companionship — like an agreement amongst those who built it that movement must continue despite aerial omnipresence. It is a communal architecture of defiance.

Yet the fear never entirely dissipates. It settles into the body. The shoulders remain slightly raised. One scans not only the road ahead but the sky glimpsed through gaps in the fabric. Every dark speck triggers evaluation. Bird or machine? Wind-blown debris or descending munition?

What is perhaps most striking is how quickly this becomes normal. After several journeys, one calibrates one’s anxiety. The extraordinary becomes procedural. One learns which stretches are frequently targeted, which times of day are worst, how convoys stagger their spacing to reduce losses. War becomes logistics under observation.

Driving under nets near the front line is therefore not an episode of cinematic drama. It is something more insidious — the steady internalisation of being watched by a machine.

There is, too, a moral dimension. The roads under nets are arteries sustaining a country fighting for survival. They carry ammunition, medical supplies, fuel, food and information. They are expressions of a society that refuses paralysis. Each vehicle that passes unscathed is a minor victory against technological intimidation.

And yet one never forgets that many vehicles have not passed unscathed.

When I finally leave the netted sections and return to open roads further west — where the sky is once again merely sky — I find myself glancing upward regardless. The habit lingers. The mind, having adjusted to vertical threat, does not immediately relinquish it.

In Lviv, where cafés are full and façades intact, the idea of driving beneath camouflage mesh seems remote — almost theatrical. But near the line of contact it is unremarkable. It is infrastructure adapted to an era in which cheap unmanned aircraft have altered the physics of fear.

Driving under nets teaches a stark lesson: the front line is no longer a line. It is a volume — a three-dimensional space in which danger descends as readily as it advances. And in that volume, every journey is conducted in negotiation with the unseen.

One drives, therefore, not simply towards a destination but through a contested sky — trusting in woven fabric, in the skill of unseen engineers, and in the slender hope that today, at least, the drone operator is looking elsewhere.