Meet Yevhen Pronin, acting president of the Ukraine track and field federation. A few days ago, he was at the world track and field championships in Eugene, Oregon. Now he’s back at war, using armed drones to blow up Russian tanks.
Because his mobile drone operating group is so very good at what they do, the Russians have put a bounty on their heads.
In one intercepted phone call, he said, the Russians talked about a specific amount — rumor has it, maybe $10,000. In another, it was said that there would be a reward, without details.
Yevhen Pronin in Eugene at the world track and field championships
With the European track championships starting next week in Munich, it’s likely Pronin’s story may draw more attention. In Eugene, incredibly, it got almost none, underscoring, again, the perils of a story hiding in plain sight in an era of pack journalism.
The Oregonian noted that he was on the “front lines.” The Los Angeles Times wrote a long feature story about the Ukrainian team and its hopes for the Eugene meet. That piece began with a riff on Pronin “near the front lines,” going on to say his nights were “spent flying drones to gather reconnaissance on Russian positions.”
There’s so, so much more.
Like this:
Asked at a news conference in Eugene what words he might have for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who launched the war on February 24, just four days after the close of the Beijing Olympic Winter Games, Pronin said, “The first message is no words …
“I have no words. For example, five months ago I can ask Putin, please stop the war, please stop your soldiers. But when they kill 300 Ukrainian children,” authorities reporting that as of mid-June 313 Ukrainian children were dead because of the war, twice as many injured, “I can say nothing.
“I can say he must go, with the warship,” among other things a reference to the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea fleet, sunk east of Snake Island on April 14, Ukrainian officials claiming by two missiles.
Pronin, 31, would perhaps seem an unlikely warrior. From Cherkasy, about 125 miles south of Ukraine’s capital, he is a lawyer, the managing partner in a Kyiv-based firm.
He is an active user of social media — the personification of a new generation not only ready but more than prepared to take over from the likes of the iconic 58-year-old Sergei Bubka, the 1980s-era pole vault champion, whom the International Olympic Committee has drafted to oversee a fund for Ukrainian athletes affected by the war. Suggestion: it might make good forensic accounting sense to see where every single dollar of that money is going, and has gone, along with any and all goods or value in kind associated with the fund. Has any of it, by chance, made its way to any black market channels?
Meantime, Pronin’s fiancée, 30-year-old Ramina Eshakzai, is something of a pop culture phenom in Ukraine — TV star, fashion model, journalist, founder of her own YouTube channel (it translates into English as, “There are rumors,” and boasts 1.18 million subscribers).
As soon as Russia invaded, Pronin said, his days of full-time lawyering were immediately over. He went through a military training camp in March for, he said, two or three weeks.
He’d had prior experience, he said, using drones.
So, after that camp, it was on.
Sometimes, as Pronin said, there are no words.
These videos, which he authorized via WhatsApp late Wednesday Ukraine time for publication — “OK. You can use all,” he wrote — offer a slice of what the past five-plus months have been like for him and his team.
OK, some words. There’s plainly a vivid strategy to killing Russian tanks. The idea, as the very first video attached to this column indicates, is to hit the back of the tank. Kill shots not only disable the armored vehicle but drive the occupants out of it. As they escape the burning wreckage, they are then individually targeted.
This — this is war.
At that same news conference in Eugene, Pronin said, “We must answer aggression with aggression. On our land. and not in Russia. They start this war. but we must finish this war.
“And we can finish this war. Of course with victory. But only with our power and the power of all the world.”