At about 1 a.m. this past Sunday morning, I pulled into a gas station in Yahodyn, in Ukraine near the border with Poland. I was traveling with a delegation from With Honor, a group that helps elect veterans to Congress, and we were returning from a trip to the front lines in Kharkiv, in the southeast. As we piled out of the vans in which we’d spent the last 10 hours, Rye Barcott, the founder of With Honor and an old friend from the Marines, noticed a gaggle of Ukrainian teens drinking and smoking in the parking lot. He said it was good to see young people enjoying themselves, but wondered if they would be conscripted soon. Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian member of parliament we were traveling with, told us, “They have a little time,” and explained that conscription comes at age 25.
We grabbed drinks and snacks, used the restroom, and then piled back into our vans to cross the border back to Poland. Ten minutes later, air raid warnings lit up our phones, an unlikely occurrence this far west. Then, a Russian drone struck the gas station we had been at moments before. A few miles away, a second drone struck a train, narrowly missing former CIA director David Petraeus (who was at the station), and a recently departed train carrying former British prime minister Boris Johnson and Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden. No one, thankfully, was injured.
I didn’t know it yet, standing in that parking lot, but the strike was the clearest evidence I’d seen in four years of traveling to this war that something had shifted. Had the drone hurt or killed anyone, it would have had significant consequences. But Russia’s attempt wasn’t a sign of strength. Indeed, while Russia has had the advantage for most of this conflict, after this trip, I am no longer sure that remains true.
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