The Night Watchman: Hunting Shaheds over Odesa
By Matthew Parish
Monday 21 September 2026
There are jobs in war whose terror comes from movement. Infantrymen run between positions, medics race towards casualties and artillery crews work furiously once coordinates arrive, knowing that counter-battery fire may already be searching for them. Then there are jobs whose peculiar burden is stillness. Somewhere outside Odesa, while the city goes about the complicated business of sleeping during wartime, a Ukrainian soldier waits for something to appear in the darkness. His task is deceptively simple to describe: he must help prevent Russian Shahed-type attack drones from reaching the city.
He belongs to the enormous and continually evolving defensive machinery that Ukraine has constructed against Russia’s long-range aerial campaign. Increasingly, that machinery includes interceptor drones: comparatively inexpensive aircraft intended to pursue and destroy the slower one-way attack drones that Russia sends towards Ukrainian cities. Discussions of this technology tend naturally to concentrate upon machines: speed, range, sensors, communications, production numbers and cost ratios. All these things matter, but they obscure the person sitting at the end of the system, whose principal occupation for much of the night is simply to wait.
Waiting is one of the oldest military duties. Roman sentries waited on walls, sailors stood watches upon black seas and soldiers in trenches stared into no-man’s-land, trying to decide whether a shadow was a bush or a man. Radar operators during the Cold War watched screens for indications that might announce the end of civilisation. The equipment changes, but the psychological problem remains remarkably constant. Somebody must remain awake because everybody else is asleep, and the consequences of his allowing his concentration to lapse may be borne by people he has never met.
The modern drone interceptor operator is an especially strange version of the night watchman because his battlefield may initially appear almost empty. There may be no enemy soldiers within many kilometres. The danger is instead somewhere in an enormous volume of night sky. Intelligence reports and detection systems provide warnings, routes are estimated and sounds may become audible. Somewhere out there is a machine carrying explosives and travelling towards a city whose lights have mostly disappeared beneath wartime precautions.
Odesa lies ahead, a city for which night has always seemed particularly natural. She is a city of restaurants, courtyards, balconies, sea air and late conversations, and even in war she retains something of her historic refusal to become solemn. People walk along Deribasivska, couples sit together in cafés and sailors, soldiers, journalists, aid workers and the displaced pass through her streets. The Black Sea is invisible at night, but its presence can still be felt in the wind and in the peculiar atmosphere of a city whose identity has always been bound to the water.
Then an air-raid warning sounds and another Odesa emerges. People check their telephones. Some go downstairs, while others continue eating or move into corridors away from windows. Some have heard so many alarms that they scarcely react anymore. Children are carried half-asleep into shelters and elderly people make calculations about stairs. Somewhere a bartender continues polishing glasses, somewhere a surgeon continues an operation and somewhere a woman lies awake listening for the characteristic engine noise in the darkness. Outside the city, somebody is listening more carefully still.
The Shahed has acquired a peculiar place in the Ukrainian imagination. Missiles are faster and often vastly more destructive, but speed has a psychological mercy because events happen quickly. A Shahed may make its presence known for an extended period. Its engine produces the notorious droning sound from which Ukrainians have generated a variety of sardonic nicknames, and it may be heard approaching, receding and changing direction. The listener is given time to contemplate what it is carrying and to wonder where it is going. In this sense the Shahed is not merely a weapon but an instrument of suspense.
For the soldier charged with interception, suspense becomes professional responsibility. He cannot react to every sound, become distracted by every report or relax because nothing has happened for an hour. Indeed the attack that does not arrive may be psychologically dangerous precisely because it encourages the mind to wander. Vigilance must be preserved against boredom, which is considerably harder than it sounds. Human beings are not naturally designed to maintain absolute concentration upon events that occur rarely and unpredictably.
The body becomes cold. Coffee ceases to work. The telephone offers temptations and thoughts intrude. A conversation from yesterday returns inexplicably, or a relationship begins to seem more complicated at three in the morning than it did at lunchtime. Cigarettes accumulate and the darkness becomes familiar. The soldier must nevertheless remain attentive because at any moment something may change: information reaches him that a target is coming and the long period of inactivity abruptly becomes purposeful.
At that moment the lonely night watch becomes intensely concentrated. The drone that had existed as an abstraction on a screen or in reports becomes a physical object moving through Ukrainian airspace, and the interceptor must meet it. A machine has to be sent into the darkness to find another machine. The engagement may last only a short time, but it is the purpose for which hours of uneventful vigilance have been endured.
This is an extraordinarily modern form of combat. The enemy pilot is absent because there is no enemy pilot. The Russian or Iranian-designed aircraft is executing instructions generated far away, while against it flies another unmanned aircraft controlled or supervised through another technological chain. Human beings have progressively withdrawn from the physical point at which violence occurs. Yet human responsibility has not disappeared; it has merely moved backwards along the chain.
The operator knows what lies beyond him. If the Shahed passes, it does not simply disappear from his screen and cease to exist. It continues towards somewhere: perhaps a port facility, electrical infrastructure, an industrial site or an apartment building beside the intended target. Perhaps it will strike nothing militarily significant at all. War is filled with errors, malfunctions, inaccurate coordinates and the brutal geography of blast effects, and therefore failure always has an imagined destination.
This must be one of the loneliest features of the job. A soldier defending a trench knows approximately what happens if the trench is lost because the consequences are physically present before him. The interceptor operator works with possibilities. Somewhere beyond the horizon are hundreds of thousands of strangers whom he will never meet. They do not know his name and most do not know where he is. They may never know that he existed, and if he succeeds they may not even know that they were in danger.
There is something profoundly peculiar about successful air defence in this respect because its triumph is an absence. The explosion that does not occur leaves no crater. The apartment that does not burn appears exactly as it did yesterday. The child who was not injured goes to school, the electricity remains on and the port worker reports for his shift. Nothing happened, and yet somebody worked all night precisely to make nothing happen.
Modern societies have difficulty recognising this kind of achievement because we naturally record events rather than non-events. Photographs show destroyed buildings, journalists interview survivors and governments publish casualty figures. The successful interception leaves, at most, fragments scattered across a field and a terse announcement that another target was destroyed. For the operator, however, those fragments may represent the entire meaning of the night, after which there is no ceremony and often scarcely any pause. He returns to waiting because there may be another target behind the first.
There is no guarantee that the next interception will succeed merely because the previous one did. Machines malfunction, communications fail, weather changes, batteries weaken and targets alter course. Enemy tactics evolve as defenders learn to defeat them. The technological competition between attack and defence is relentless, and every successful innovation eventually produces an attempt to overcome it. The soldier therefore understands that experience is indispensable but never conclusive.
Ukraine has become an immense laboratory for this contest. She has done so not because she wished to pioneer a new form of warfare but because necessity forced her to improvise. Expensive surface-to-air missiles cannot sensibly be the sole answer to comparatively inexpensive attack drones launched in large numbers, and hence interceptor drones have emerged as part of a broader effort to create defensive economics that can be sustained. Behind the economics, however, lies exhaustion, because every ingenious piece of technology still depends somewhere upon human beings who must operate, maintain or supervise it.
A Shahed does not care whether the man hunting it has slept. It does not become bored, think about its family, resent the cold or wonder whether the war will end. It cannot become frightened by an explosion or complacent after six uneventful hours. Machinery possesses an enormous military advantage precisely because machinery has no interior life, whereas the soldier waiting for it necessarily does.
Perhaps he thinks about Odesa. Perhaps he knows her well, or perhaps he hardly knows her at all. His home may be hundreds of kilometres away. In wartime armies scatter people across geography, assigning them responsibility for places that were previously only names on maps. Yet defending a city creates an unusual intimacy with it. The soldier may come to know its nightly rhythms without participating in them. He knows when people are asleep because that is when he must be awake, and he experiences the city principally through the threats approaching her.
This is the paradox of the night watchman: he is separated from ordinary life precisely so that ordinary life can continue. The loneliness is not necessarily dramatic, because most military loneliness is not. It consists of small things: messages unanswered because everyone else is asleep, food eaten at strange hours, conversations interrupted by duties that cannot easily be explained and the gradual inversion of night and day. War produces spectacular images, but much of the lived experience of war consists of boredom, inconvenience and accumulated fatigue. Vigilance means resisting all three.
There is also the knowledge that the enemy is learning. Every night is part of an experiment conducted by both sides. Routes change, altitudes change, numbers change and decoys appear. Defenders adapt and attackers adapt to the adaptation, so what worked last month may become inadequate next month. The operator inhabits a battlefield without stable rules, in which yesterday’s ingenious solution may become tomorrow’s obsolete equipment.
This is characteristic of the wider drone war in Ukraine. Technology that once seemed exotic becomes ordinary with astonishing speed. Devices are developed, copied, modified and mass-produced, while software changes faster than traditional military procurement systems were ever designed to accommodate. Soldiers become reluctant engineers and engineers become participants in combat. The distinction between factory and battlefield grows increasingly indistinct because the contest in the sky is inseparable from the contest over who can design, manufacture and modify machines more quickly.
At three o’clock in the morning, however, none of these grand observations matters very much. There is only the next object moving towards Odesa. The soldier may hear distant gunfire from another air-defence team, see the horizon flash or receive messages reporting other targets. Perhaps the familiar engine noise grows louder. When the circumstances demand it, he launches, and a small interceptor disappears into the darkness in pursuit of another small aircraft.
For a brief period an entire chain of human ingenuity is concentrated upon that encounter: designers, programmers, factory workers, intelligence officers, detection crews, communications specialists and the soldier himself. Against them stands another chain of engineers, manufacturers, planners and launch crews assembled by Russia and her suppliers. The technological complexity is enormous, but the final proposition is primitive. One object is trying to reach a city and another is trying to prevent it.
If the interception succeeds, there is an explosion somewhere in the darkness and the Shahed falls. The city may hear the detonation and wonder what happened. Telegram channels fill with speculation. Somebody rolls over in bed, while somebody else curses because the noise woke the baby. Another person checks whether the electricity remains on and goes back to sleep. The operator cannot necessarily do the same because there may be another Shahed coming.
Thus the essential experience of his war begins again: not excitement but attention, not heroism in its theatrical sense but wakefulness. The hours accumulate and the Black Sea remains black while Odesa waits for dawn. The soldier’s achievement is measured less in things that happen than in disasters that fail to occur, and the better he performs his work the less visible that work may become to the people for whom he performs it.
Morning in a city after an air raid has an extraordinary banality. Buses run, coffee shops open and people complain about being tired. Traffic returns, dogs are walked and shopkeepers raise their shutters. Unless something has been struck, there may be remarkably little evidence that during the night machines carrying explosives crossed the country towards them. This return to the ordinary is itself the purpose of air defence, although almost nobody experiencing the ordinary morning has reason to think about it in those terms.
Eventually the soldier’s shift ends, although wars are indifferent to schedules. He may look towards the city whose night he has guarded. Most of its inhabitants will never see him. They will never know how tired he was, how long he waited or how many times he stared into an apparently empty sky. They will not know the precise sequence of events by which one small aircraft found another in the darkness, and his anonymity is not incidental to his duty but part of its nature.
The old sentry on the city wall occupied much the same moral position. Behind him were houses full of sleeping people and before him was darkness. His obligation was elementary: remain awake, notice what others cannot see and respond before danger reaches them. Technology has transformed the wall into a network of sensors, communications systems and unmanned aircraft, but it has not transformed the fundamental relationship between the watcher and the sleeping city.
Somewhere near Odesa on another night, there will be another dark sky and another long interval during which nothing appears to happen. A soldier will wait beside equipment whose sophistication would have seemed fantastical only a generation ago. He may be cold, exhausted and lonely, and he will know that somewhere beyond him people are sleeping while somewhere in front of him machines may be travelling through the darkness towards them. When the warning comes, he will turn his attention once more towards the night and do the ancient work of the watchman with the strangest of modern weapons.
