Kill Zone

The soldiers under contract with the Russian Army are sent into Ukraine. They lose their vehicles. They run across the fields. They are spotted by unmanned

aerial units, for example, “Magyar’s Birds”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/414th_Unmanned_Strike_Aviation_Brigade

The drones are piloted by Ukrainian soldiers in underground bunkers. They operate the aerial drone with a video game-like-controller, a small post held between their thumb and first finger while watching a laptop screen displaying a live video of what the drone sees. They steer the quad-copters through three dimensional space. They’ll fly the drone right up into the invader’s face, then trigger a kaboom.

The last image before the drone explodes is often the face of the Russian soldier. A final portrait. This is a new development in photography, the point of view of a deadly weapon.

I print out screen captures of published videos from these drones. I paste the prints in a sketchbook and on facing pages, I draw from the print using a Chinese calligraphy brush and black ink.

The Ukrainians threw out the Russian colonial government after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. It took twenty-four years of socio-political struggle for the Ukrainian people to make their country independent and democratic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidan_Nezalezhnosti

The dictator, Vladimir Putin (Vlad the Inhaler) is attempting to make Ukraine part of Russia.

I’m not a party to this war. As a citizen of a democracy, politically, I side with the Ukrainians. I’d like to see independent Ukraine survive and thrive.

Emotionally, I side with the combat soldiers: the Ukrainian drone operators and the Russian invaders. Both doing a nasty job for their own reasons.

The drawings I make from printed out screen captures are both for the soldier in the video and the operator watching the screen.