Filming in Ukraine
2025 - 2026
In 2025 and 2026, I filmed for close to eight months with a National Police drone school and drone teams, documenting training, technology development, and the implementation of unmanned systems in operational environments. This documentary is ongoing, and will focus on the men and women who are harnessing ever evolving tech to fight off the Russian invaders.. in a war which has lasted years... and has no end in sight.
I'd like to share a highlight reel I created for two of the drone teams from footage captured in 2025, and which was recently (summer 2026) cleared for public viewing.
Unfortunately, while filming in 2025 Russian electronic warfare systems disabled the Ukrainian kamikaze drones en route to their targets in Bakhmut. It wasn't until my next trip in 2026, that I filmed successful attack missions by the drone teams.
Here is a link to another short video I created from filming with a KORD Police Special Forces drone team as they defended the city of Kramatorsk in April of 2026. This video is hosted on Instagram and was made for the KORD team.
(Click image to open Instagram link.)
How it Started
2023
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th of 2022, like much of the world, I felt helpless to do anything but watch. However, this conflict was distinctly different in coverage. In Ukraine almost everyone has a smart phone and a social media account, and videos of fighting or atrocities spread like wildfire to tens of millions of online followers.
Personally, I was following dozens of accounts on Twitter, and I nightly spent hours before bed reading updates from volunteers: from people running supplies, to those evacuating civilians from battle zones, to medics treating wounded, to soldiers on the front lines. It was a wealth of near-real-time information and disinformation as the world had never before been privy to. Then when reports of atrocities started popping up along with accusations and denials, there were organizations like Bellingcat to cut through the BS and provide analysis and evidence.
As the one-year anniversary of the invasion approached, and western media predicted a massive event by the Russian forces to coincide with the occasion, I could no longer stand on the sidelines.
I rented a camera package, borrowed some body armor, and I set off to help.
At 2 in the morning, on the 23rd of February, 2023, I crossed into Ukraine and arrived at the
Lviv train station.
In Lviv, I became friends with Western filmmakers and YouTube Influencers.
I then took a three-hour train ride to Rivne.
Here I spent a few weeks building relationships with members of the Emergency Services, filming training exercises and providing their departments with cinematic videos for their official social media pages.
Eventually I took a train to Kharkiv and then caught a ride down to Balakliya.
It was the first town liberated from russian occupation in September of 2022, and the area is heavily mined. I filmed with EOD / De-mining teams which were focused on clearing power lines and critical infrastructure.
Many stores and buildings in Balakliya had suffered missile and artillery strikes, but even more devastated were the little villages that had been shelled, mined, and cut off from power and water.
Ukraine is now the most mined country in the world, and a rule of thumb is
to stay to hard surfaces. Unexploded ordnance is a daily killer of civilians and a plague to farmers, and if the war stopped today, it would still take more than a century to clear the country of mines and ordnance.
