Ukraine’s drone pilots compete in wartime festival in Truskavets

In Truskavets, hundreds of miles from the front line, a city park looked more like a summer fair than a wartime training ground. A big stage and jumbo screen anchored the scene, while food stands served barbecue and hot dogs beside colorful tents and families moving through the grounds. Yet the main attraction was not a concert or carnival. It was a military-run drone competition that turned the machinery of modern combat into a public spectacle.

The pilots came from 19 brigades and included some of the best drone operators in the Armed Forces and the National Guard of Ukraine. Command Sergeant Major Denys Kardash organized the event with a clear purpose: to help operators learn from one another, support one another and bring civilians closer to the people fighting the war. That social goal mattered as much as the racing itself, because the event presented soldiers not as distant figures from the front but as neighbors, many of whom were bakers, drivers or tradesmen before Russia’s full-scale invasion upended their lives.

One of the competitors, known by the call sign Liolik for security reasons, embodied that shift. He volunteered at the start of the war in March 2022, is now 31, and worked his way from infantryman and scout into a drone pilot. In one of the contest tasks, he flew a drone that had to pop a small balloon pulled by another drone, a test of precision that mirrored the kind of controlled strikes now central to Ukraine’s battlefield strategy.

The Truskavets event also fit into a wider wartime culture that has grown around drones. Another competition, Wild Drones, brought together about 300 Ukrainian drone operators in the Lviv region, giving them bragging rights, a chance to share tactics and a way to provide feedback to defense firms building equipment for the war. The first Wild Drones racing event took place in 2025 and gave servicemen a setting to trade frontline experience from operations in eastern Ukraine.

That expansion of drone competition reflects how deeply unmanned warfare has reshaped Ukraine’s military. By late 2025, drones had helped create a killing zone stretching roughly 20 kilometers from the front, blurring the old line between rear and battlefield. Kyiv has also pushed a bonus system that awards points for confirmed strikes, a sign of how thoroughly drone warfare has been folded into daily military thinking. In Truskavets, the spectacle was cheerful on the surface. Beneath it was something harder to ignore: a society learning to live with a long war whose end still remains out of sight.