Front Burner - Inside Ukraine’s kill zone

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Reporter Francis Farrell of the Kyiv Independent recently took a harrowing journey alongside a group of Ukrainian soldiers into what they describe as the kill zone.They travelled by foot down a long road swarmed by drones, littered with shell casings and bombed out vehicles. He captured the trip in a documentary that paints a stark and dystopian picture of a war that is at once both futuristic and primitive.He joins us to talk about that trip, and about the broader conflict as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy meets with other leaders at the G7, hoping to revive stalled peace talks.You can watch Francis’s documentary here.

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He is a reporter with the Kiev Independent in Ukraine and recently took this harrowing journey alongside a group of Ukrainian soldiers into what they describe as the Russian kill zone. They traveled by foot down a long, long road, absolutely swarmed by drones littered with shell casings and bombed out vehicles. His documentary paints this really stark and dystopian picture of a war that is at once both futuristic and primitive. So we're going to talk about that and on. also the broader conflict as Ukraine's president, Vladimir Zelensky, meets in France for the G7, hoping to revive Stolt peace talks. Francis, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you.

Hi, Jamie. Good to be here. So before we get to the bigger picture stuff, I do want to talk to you about your latest visit, close to the front lines. You've done some incredible reporting. And just where did you go and where did you stop? Thank you. So we visited on our last trip a few different locations.

in Dernetsk region, which is this eastern region that is the most contested and consistently the hotspot of the fighting and also the region that Russia keeps demanding Ukraine hands over in peace talks. But Ukraine is still fighting. They're still holding about a fifth of that region. And most importantly, what they are still holding includes the so-called fortress belt of cities. These are four industrial cities. cities that are very close together and together, you know, they're all very fortified and

Russia hasn't been able to take them for years and years of war. But what they have done is that they have now reached the southernmost of those cities. At the top of this hill now, the outskirts of the city of Kostjantinivka, which is basically now not only contested inside, but slowly surrounded on three sides by Russian forces, as they often do when attacking the city. that means is that the closer that you get, the logistics gets more and more deadly. And so it wasn't safe enough to actually visit that city anymore, but what we did do is try and get as close as we can down the main highway that connects all of these cities. But as you get

closer to the very front line, you know, the line of contact where the two sides are divided, that's where you see the kill zone, as they say, get more and more dangerous. dangerous. More and more drones are in the air and moving around by vehicle quickly becomes impossible or, you know, suicidally dangerous. And we walked from the last, the third city, Drushkivka, about 10 kilometers in one direction and 10 kilometers back to basically show as viscerally as possible what this kill zone really looks and feels and sounds like and who are the people still working and fighting inside it. Why would moving in a vehicle be suicidally dangerous, but walking wouldn't be necessarily,

or less dangerous, I guess? Sure. I mean, vehicles, they're big. They're difficult to hide when they move. They have to go on certain logistics routes, like the main roads, and they attract attention, and they're a priority target because they're likely to. to have several soldiers inside them, maybe some ammunition, drones, important equipment. And so they're the things that are spotted quickly and targeted often, you know, with several

drones striking them at once. And this goes for both sides. For both sides, coming closer than about five kilometers from the front line in a vehicle, usually doesn't end well. And in place of vehicles, a lot. of these ground robots, unmanned ground vehicles have been used. They're smaller. They don't have such big thermal signatures, and they can still carry a lot of supplies for logistic runs. But even they are being destroyed more and more.

So strangely, now we go all the way back to the Stone Age. And we're entering this kind of strange Mad Max world, where on one hand, we have killer drones, We have robots along the ground. But on the other hand, people are still now just forced to do all the work themselves with their hands and their feet and their human strength. We saw kind of people just on foot carrying supplies themselves, sometimes on trolleys. Because if you're on foot, you're less visible, you're less of a target. and if there is a reported drone in the air, it's actually quite easy to just pop into some bushes,

stay still, and if you don't do anything stupid, you won't be spotted. And there's also this netting, right, over top of the road that you walk down. And it's kind of hard to describe what it looks like, but it's basically this netting that looks like spider webs covering the road for miles and miles and miles. What does the netting do? The netting is being put up all over the country in areas near the front line. These are designed to protect the main logistics routes of the military. You know, roads that are also used by civilians as well.

Any roads that travel near the front line, because these are priority targets for Russian drones. There is an anticipation that, you know, if Russian forces advance or, you know, they get their drones to fly further, then the areas further in the rear could come. under attack from these drones. But the closer you get, when you get into the range of these first-person view drones, so these are the small ones that cost only about $400. They're very expendable. Both sides use tens of thousands of them per day. That's the time when you really want that basic netting above your head to protect yourself. And, you know, if we look back a few years, a lot of vehicles they were being fitted with these big jamming devices on their roofs,

these big electronic warfare devices which jammed the radio signal of the drones. But over the last year and a half, both sides have started using fiber optic drones, which led out a long, very thin cable of fiber optic behind them. And those, because they have a physical connection to the pilot, are completely unjammable. And that's why Ukraine started building these nets, which are really just huge tunnels of like fishing net style barriers to just have that physical barrier so that even a fiber optic drone cannot make it through. Of course, you can put a hole in the nets. You can find the entrances.

They're not a perfect kind of protection, but it does go a long way. What was it like for you to constantly see these Russian drones flying around? Like, are you always looking up? Are you always feeling like you're on edge? Yeah, well, I think what was interesting about doing this on foot was that we kind of experienced what it was like for a Ukrainian foot soldier, for example, to walk to positions. And we met soldiers who were on their way out as well. and you just understand how dangerous this journey is,

how you just always have to keep your eyes and ears out for something in the sky. By the time we got to the end, which was maybe about three kilometers away from this city of Kostjantinovka, where we turned around, you know, there was something in the air around us, basically constantly. And that sound is the successful shooting down of an FPV.

But you see there's, there seems to be, more in the air. That one was getting very close to where we are now. Difficult to see what it's looking at. Just the closer you closer you get every hundred meters. It just gets more and more of them. And then you have to think about, you know, what kind of sound does that drone or that drone make? Is it friendly or foe? You know, you have a lot of cases of friendly fire because, you know, if there's a drone above you, you just want to shoot it down. You don't know if it's friendly or an enemy drone. Right.

And it just, you know, puts you in a position where you're just like constantly listening, you're constantly twitching, you're constantly hiding. And that is basically the environment that anyone who's fighting, you know, deep in this kill zone is living on a daily basis. And these soldiers, they are trying to shoot them down.

I was really interested to see in your dog that, like, they're using automatic rifles, what look like automatic rifles, to me, but also just like shotgun. Yeah, so some soldiers, it's funny, some prefer the automatic rifle because they have a bit more ammunition and they're used to using them more.

Logically, a shotgun, if it's a quality, like semi-automatic shotgun or a pump action, then that makes sense if you've learned how to use it because it spreads around a little bit and it's easier to shoot down a flying, moving target. Some soldiers are better shots than other, others, but the most important thing is to have quantity. So that's why along the road, and we

stopped to meet a few of them, there were these small groups whose job it is to just stand guard, wait for signals of Russian drones heading down the road, and just try and shoot them down. At the moment, it seems like a primitive solution. You would think, okay, maybe there should be some kind of automatic high-tech turret that could be shooting them down. And we know that both sides are working on that kind of solution. But even that is going to have its disadvantages. It's going to be expensive. So once again, it comes down to human beings, basic weapons, and their aim to genetically bring these drones down. Yeah. You know, the other thing which I think surprised me was that there are also people living along and near this road to,

there's this one moment where you just get passed by someone on a bicycle. And just can you tell me more about just the ordinary Ukrainians that you met? How are they surviving? What is life like for them in this kind of environment? Yeah, sure. I mean, civilians that are hanging on until the very end in frontline areas, it's not a new thing. It's something, you know, people that we meet basically all the time in our trips to front line cities even cities that are almost surrounded by the Russians

or even cities where there's no semblance of civilization left. It's easy from an outside perspective I think to say, you know, why don't they leave? And that is the question that we ask them, of course. A we're going to?

Well, I'm going, of course. There will, obviously. The answer is always a strange sometimes. ambiguous combination of things. It's definitely a very small proportion of the original population that's still hanging on. But, you know, Ukraine's benefits and support for internally displaced persons is notoriously insufficient.

Some people, you know, might be more on the pro-Russian side. I've heard funny stories about how they think that it's the U.S. Ukrainian soldiers that are destroying their own city, even though Russia is attacking. But more than anything, it's two things. It's people's just intense connection and holding onto their home, their land. I often hear that their relatives are buried here. They're not going to leave. But often, you know, as the frontline approaches, it's also that they just lose connection to reality.

They just really get used to this kind of. war-torn hellscape. And they have enough humanitarian aid, enough water and food kind of stocked away, and they just kind of continue living in this frozen limbo state where it just gets worse and worse and worse. But they never feel the momentum to actually leave. At XYZ Storage, spring cleaning just got a whole lot easier. Enjoy five months of savings at up to 80.

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of visible feed wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned before that you would encounter soldiers that had come up from their positions on the front line, and I think they're spending a long time there, like months at a time. And just what would the fighting look like just right on the front line? And how does it kind of differ to the fighting that you were witnessing close to the front line walking up this highway? Yeah. So I think like even if you go back two years, let alone, you know, the first years of the war, the fighting in Ukraine was very often compared to like World War I. Like you had long lines of trenches, manned by infantry, both sides and no man's land in between. And it was just like World War I, but with drones.

Now that's changing because, A, Ukraine has a really dire shortage of manpower, and that's especially felt in the infantry because they're doing the hardest, deadliest job and no one really wants to go there. So these are forcefully mobilized people. These are often older, people who don't really have, you know, many other options in the military. And, And there's less and less of them. And that's why they have to stay longer. They struggle to replenish and rotate themselves. But another big part of that equation is the fact that it's just getting so deadly to even survive on those infantry positions.

And it's now less of a continuous like World War I style trench line and more of just a scattered series of, you know, holes here, a dugout here, a basement there with one or two people. in each of them. And it's an incredibly deadly journey through the worst of that kill zone where drones are hunting from all directions. So now you can hear a few different drones in the air. Where you could be stepping on a mine, there's artillery working. And once you're there, it's difficult to even do the fighting because once again, if you stick your head out of that hole that you're in, if you show yourself to try and fight off the enemy, then you make yourself immediately a target for all the drones in the sky. And so that's why, you know, those two factors together are the reason why infantry are now spending more and more time on the front line. And

I've just seen this kind of developer as time has passed. You know, even a year ago or two years ago, it was like a big deal to spend two months on the front line. Then it became, you know, three months. You heard stories of then six months. And now you hear more and more stories of 200, 300 days plus, sometimes even over a year. And so one of the infantrymen that we met, he was out there for about 100 days. It was just so surreal that, you know, we think back to the really difficult winter that Ukraine had.

And he went out to his infantry position in Kostentinovka back then. And so when he finally walked out, winter had gone to spring and then to summer, and he was still in his winter, you know, his warm winter clothes. I think I know who you're talking about. He's an older guy, too. He was one of these, he looked like, I mean, I don't know, but he looked certainly over 50, maybe 60. Well, 60 is the age when you're no longer eligible. You can retire from the military and you won't get mobilized. but yeah he was in his 50s i think he was 53 or 55 or something but you know when you've spent that long in those conditions uh you grow your beard and everything he he certainly did look even older and and you know it's it's that's that's the face of of the people holding the front line in many cases uh and you know these are people who probably uh not ideal physically uh maybe you know

not mentally. It doesn't seem fair that this burden is being put on them, but they are even more so because of that heroes, because they're just, you know, accepting that this is their job now. If they don't stop Russia here, they'll go forward to their home. And a lot of them just accepted and just keep fighting. Can you tell me more about that? Like their morale in general? Like, how would you describe it? I mean, I think morale is a difficult thing to kind of generalize on because it really depends on everyone's individual situation. Like, have they been fighting since the beginning of the full scale war or have they been avoiding it and they only just got mobilized? Are they fighting, as I mentioned in the infantry?

Or are they a drone pilot or are they, you know, in a safe place a bit further back? It really depends on a lot of those things. But of course, there are universal things that come up. You know, people are tired, people are burnt out, people want to go home. And it's actually one of the things that the defense ministry is trying to fix with some, you know, new systems of contracts and terms of service. And these infantry people, these infantrymen that we were talking about, they've gotten a huge pay rise. And they're now going to be making around $7,000 US dollars a month for doing the job that they're doing, is unheard of, you know, in the military, in Ukraine, one of Europe's poorest countries. And they only have to serve now for 10 months at a time, and then they can be discharged for a while.

And these are kind of the changes that are trying to incentivize people to, you know, pump themselves up and feel rewarded for doing this job. But it's not perfect. And there are still a lot of complaints about the system. People want to go home. Some people, do go AWOL, but more or less, the soldiers I speak to, they have a clearer picture than anyone else about the fact that, yes, they're tired, but if they let go, if the Ukrainian military as a whole kind of lets go and stops the pressure now and starts collapsing, that's when everything that Russia tried at the very beginning of the war, you know, could still be realized. That feels like maybe a good segue to a broader conversation that we could have now.

I just want to zoom out a bit and talk about the state of the war. So as I mentioned in the intro, the G7 meeting is this week, and Zelensky has walked into it with maybe more momentum on his side than perhaps previously. I don't know if you would agree with that. But if you do, why is that? Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. In my opinion, it's not the peace talks themselves that matter because, you know, clearly in Russia still wants Ukraine's capitulation, whether it's now or a bit later down the line and Ukraine just wants to survive now and in the future. What's really important is the balance of power between the two sides.

And that is what you, I think, were talking about when you said momentum. And here, you know, we are in a much better place than we were. were, let's say, at this time last year. If we think about last year, this is when, you know, it really seemed like the Trump administration was going to abandon Ukraine. They really seemed like it was going to be easier to put pressure on Kiev than on Moscow to kind of relent in this war. And at the same time, almost more importantly, you know, Russia was making some serious gains on the front line. But fast forward to this year, you know, it's this time. summer, a spring summer that is usually the height of when things really start moving forward

quickly on the front line, when Russian gains would be expected to be really picking up the pace. And that's just not happening for a lot of reasons. I think, first of all, on the tactical level, the increased saturation of drones, you know, the same kill zone I was talking about, I think it looks even worse on the Russian side because Ukraine seems to be having an advantage with their equality of drones, with the technology that goes into them. It was a big deal that Russia was cut off from Starlink back in February. And it's the Russians who have this pressure to move forward.

They're on the attack. They're getting orders from Putin. We need the rest of Donbass now, so move forward. But they're succeeding less and less. Meanwhile, Ukraine has also had a lot more success in the kind of operational depth, the middle strike range is what they call it, which is kind of from 30 kilometers to maybe about 200 kilometers behind the front line. They're using this kind of new class of drones, including one that's very cheap but powered by American AI tech. and that's really doing amazing work hunting Russian logistics further back. So like fuel, military vehicles, trucks, supplies on roads that they thought were very safe,

including the roads to Crimea. That's causing a lot of problems. That's causing the fuel crisis in Crimea. And then lastly, we have the success that Ukraine has had with the longer range strike drones. this is what you see when you see news of another oil refinery or another big port burning, you know, really deep inside Russian territory at a distance which Ukraine, you know, with Western weapons, was never able to hit. But now they have this huge industry of long range drones that are homegrown, homemade, home designed. And with the help of foreign intelligence,

they're hitting these targets more and more consistently. You know, here in the newsroom, It used to be a big deal, you know, hitting this oil refinery way back inside Russian territory. And now it literally happens every day. And we just say to each other, okay, who's doing the latest refinery piece? Just gather what's burning in Russia and put it all in one article. And what this does is it puts pressure on Vladimir Putin because Vladimir Putin is the one guy who decides when this war ends and how it ends on the Russian.

side. And so far, he's done a lot to try. And, you know, he's, he's ramping up the war machine. He's ramping up defense spending. He's not stepping back in his very maximalist demands. He still wants Ukraine to hand over territory. But increasingly, if the cost of that is raised, both in the economy and especially on the front line, he's going to have to make more and more tradeoffs. So far, he's tried to pursue his war whilst, projecting this image of the provider of strength and stability inside Russia. But the more this goes on in the current trajectory we see, the more he'll have to think about announcing mobilization, you know, cutting more and more public spending, cutting pensions,

and just really driving Russia as a country into the ground for the sake of a war that's providing diminishing returns. if the Ukrainian defense holds strong. And that's where Zelensky sees the opportunity to negotiate from a position of strength. And for the Trump administration, for Donald Trump himself, who likes to back the winner, who likes the idea of strength, I think Zelensky is making a very strong argument at this point. Right. That's what he's trying to do this week. Trump remarked that Ukraine and Russia should make a deal.

It's one of the things he said. I think he called the death count ridiculous. But he also said on Tuesday that the U.S. had nothing to do with a war thousands of miles away other than the U.S. selling weapons to Ukraine. And French President Emmanuel Macron was caught on a hot mic, right, saying that he had a difficult discussion with Trump when it came to Ukraine. And I just, what is it that Zelensky and other leaders are trying to get from Trump this week? Well, I mean, yeah, it seems like, you know, he's. He's not interested and he hasn't been that interested, let's be honest, you know, for a long time now. I think especially since, you know, they made a lot of effort with the Alaska Summit.

But that was basically, once again, listening to Russia's demands and then finding out from Ukraine and for Europe that they're ridiculous and that Ukraine will not even think about considering them. And so since then, we've seen him kind of disengaged. But it's worth remembering here that that kind of personal diplomatic disengagement is still a much better scenario than what we had way back last year after the Oval Office meeting where he was actually cutting off intelligence. He was cutting off aid that was already paid for. And since then, the intelligence has continued to come, which Ukraine does really rely on. And he's allowed European countries to pay for American weapons, which European countries have stepped up and done, you know, other NATO member states through the so-called Pearl initiative. And so far that, if we look at the battlefield results and the results in the war, that is an acceptable scenario for Ukraine. The one, you know, real crisis point is, of course, the air defense.

from the ballistic missiles, specifically the US-made Patriot system, which remains the only, you know, system that can actually shoot down Russian ballistic missiles, the same ones that were fired in great numbers just two days ago, in Kiev, which was not a fun night to sleep through at all. And more and more, you know, we've been feeling the shortage of these missiles, which are now in huge demand because of the war in Iran. And that's going to be the key thing. I know that Zelensky is pushing for peace talks to be revived right now. And given where Ukraine is right now in the war, like what would an acceptable peace deal look like to Ukraine?

And how far apart are they? from Russia right now. If we look at last year, Kiev's strategy for peace talks, you know, especially given this very, very sensitive dance with Donald Trump and the strong desire to show that it was Ukraine that was the side that was ready for peace and Russia, you know, didn't want peace. That's why they needed to be pressured. If we go back to March 2025, that's when Ukraine, together with Mark Carribio, agreed to call for an unconditional 30-day cease-fight, just stop the fighting. And I think Ukraine is continuing along that line, but now feeling themselves in a stronger

and stronger position, it's less about just stopping the fighting with no guarantee that it won't start again very soon, and more about putting mechanisms. in place as part of this peace deal to make sure that Russia doesn't and cannot start its war again. And that's where you get into these so-called security guarantees. And that becomes very difficult because still, you know, no piece of paper is really enough for Ukraine to make them feel that any country will come and protect them. Because we know that de facto, no Western country, whether it's Europe or the U.S., is ready to go to war for Russia, with Russia, if they break an agreement on a piece of paper.

So just like with peace talks, as I said earlier, it's not about what's on the piece of paper. It's about the balance of power that lies behind it. And this is why Ukraine's feeling stronger and they want to end the war in a strong position with a strong military intact. and in a position where they can say, you know, Russia, you know, you're the one who needs to be suing for peace at this point. And we need to agree to have these NATO forces inside Ukraine, this kind of peacekeeping contingent, for example. For Russia, on the other hand, you know, on paper, they're still very far. They still talk about these anchorage agreements where they

convinced Trump that Ukraine just needs to give away this little piece of land. and then they can start really talking about peace. And of course, it comes back to Putin. It comes back to this guy who really does hold the power at the top of the Russian power vertical who decides when his war is going to be over. And he's not getting really accurate information about the front line.

He's very isolated. He's very angry. And so Ukraine will really need to turn the screws, I think, a little bit more before he even begins to change his mind, I think. Okay. That feels like a good place for us to leave it. And just for people listening, your documentary, which is so excellent, people can find it

on the keep independent on your YouTube channel. We're going to link to it in our show notes. Francis, thank you, as always. Thanks, Jamie. Great to talk to you. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcast, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.