Kyiv, March 8. From a pharmacy assistant in a small town in Poland to the person in charge of buying the components used to manufacture the drones of the “Angry Birds”, the only Ukrainian army unit that designs and uses its own drones to attack the enemy beyond the front line.
This is the path followed by Svitlana Titova, a 37-year-old Ukrainian woman who, after taking refuge in Poland, returned to her country with her 12-year-old son to enlist in the army, where she is responsible for the supply in this unit, traveled in a few months of 2022. , which bears the name, “angry birds” in Spanish, of a popular video game.
As in the video game, the Ukrainian “Angry Birds” control with their controls a flock of colorful birds that fight in the air against those who attack them, the green pigs in the case of the video game and the Russian forces in the case of the Ukrainian military unit. .
“Los ingenieros de la unidad me dicen lo que necesitan y yo busco las piezas en países como Taiwán, Estados Unidos, Polonia, Dinamarca o Australia”, dice esta antigua profesional del sector farmacéutico, que explica que están intendando dejar de depend para estos componentes from China.
If at first they could get their supplies from companies dedicated to recreational drones, for photographers or children, things are now complicated, since the demand for these devices created by the war in Ukraine has left many producers without inventory.
“The main problem is the shortage,” Titova told Efe on International Women’s Day in downtown Kyiv. This forces his unit to hone its ingenuity and resort to components not originally intended for drones, like the Tesla batteries they use to keep their unmanned devices aloft.
Asked about the mission fulfilled by these artefacts, Titova responds forcefully: “Attack the Russians”. The “Angry Birds” have already developed a dozen prototypes. Some of them have been approved by the Ministry of Defense and are used from areas close to the front.
The unit’s emblem is a blue bird inspired by the video game, and is made up of around fifty professional soldiers and volunteers like Titova.
They were mostly engineers, programmers and technology experts from various economic sectors who contributed their knowledge and experience to the war effort.
Svitlana Titova is from the city of Mykolaiv, located just 70 kilometers from the city of Kherson, one of the first to fall into Russian hands at the start of the invasion. Control of Kherson allowed Russian forces to bombard Mykolaiv daily for months, prompting Titova to take refuge in Poland.
There, the 37-year-old felt that donating and collecting aid for war victims and her army was not enough and she decided to return with her son to her Mykolaiv, where the attacks of missiles have ceased to be daily since Ukraine regained control. from Kherson in November.
“I felt like I had to do more,” Titova says of what prompted him to enlist. “We all have many reasons to go on with our lives and not join the army, but if we all said the same thing, Russia would have already won and there would be no Ukraine,” explains the volunteer.
Marcel Gascon