Looking back, it should have been obvious—the warning wasn’t subtle. When I texted my friend, the frontline commander I called Fin—I always used his army call sign, not his civilian name—the screen stared back at me ominously: “Last seen January 3, 2026”—at least three weeks earlier. I told myself it was nothing. He’d probably changed his phone number or switched to a different carrier. But my explanations felt thinner and thinner as the hours ticked by. Finally, in the evening, I started texting others who knew him, and the news came the next day from his unit’s press officer: “Code 200. Fin has been killed in action.”
Later that week, still battling shock and grief, I read in the media that Volodymyr Zelensky, long hesitant to reveal casualty figures, had finally gone public with a number. According to the president’s office, 55,000 Ukrainians, volunteers and regular soldiers, have fallen in battle since the Russian invasion in February 2022. This is a tiny fraction of the enemy total. Ukrainian and Western analysts estimate 1.2 million Russians killed, wounded, and missing. But both numbers looked different to me in the stark light of my friend’s sacrifice.
Volodymyr Barantsov, 52, born in the last decades of Soviet Ukraine, came of age in the tough, industrial city of Mykolaiv just as his country gained independence in 1991. One of his city’s first entrepreneurs, pioneering capitalism in a stubbornly post-communist society, he founded and ran a series of small and then medium-sized businesses—first wholesale grain trading, then agricultural services and financial consulting. By the time Russia invaded in 2022, he had built a comfortable life, with his own Kyiv-based management consulting firm and a teenage son. Like many Ukrainian men his age, he raced to join the armed forces—his code name, Fin, was short for “financial”—and was given command of a platoon fighting near Siversk. This fiercely contested frontline city has changed hands several times since the first Russian-backed fighting in Ukraine in 2014.
By the time I met him, after three years of war, Russian troops were on the verge of occupying Siversk, now reduced to rubble with almost no inhabitants, and the front was creeping west. A tall, well-built man with a graying beard and old-fashioned, chivalrous manners, Fin was based in nearby Sloviansk, where his platoon had grown into a company—just under 100 men—devoted to anti-drone defense. Another soldier fighting in the region brought the unit to my attention—I might be interested in the scrappy, innovative ways they were using technology to bring down the enemy’s unmanned aerial vehicles.
Now dubbed “Spektr,” the electronic warfare company of the 54th separate mechanized brigade used spoofing, jamming, and whatever advanced equipment, Ukrainian or foreign, it could scrounge to take down Russian drones. According to one Ukrainian media report, the team suppressed up to 80 percent of everything the enemy threw at the area it was responsible for—typically 100 to 130 unmanned aerial vehicles a day.
I wrote about this cutting-edge work for the Monthly. Then Fin and I stayed in touch. He was interested in my work—there seemed to be nothing he wasn’t interested in—and told me he was proud to be my friend. I introduced him to some European colleagues I thought might help him secure the advanced electronic equipment he coveted for his unit. We texted for the last time between Christmas and New Year’s, just days before his death.
Last week, I traveled to the front to speak to his deputy, now commander of the company—I wanted to know what Fin’s men remembered about him and how he died.
I was warned that the situation in Sloviansk was much more dangerous than when I visited last fall, and there was no mistaking the changes. The train from Kyiv, once filled with soldiers and women traveling to the front for a few stolen hours with their husbands, is no longer running. We drive the long way around on side roads to avoid the last 35-mile stretch of highway, now within range of deadly Russian UAVs. But even these smaller roads are swathed in protective netting designed to catch enemy incoming before it hits Ukrainian vehicles. A relentless barrage of drones and glide bombs has taken its toll on downtown Sloviansk. Still, the city is full of people—fatigue-clad soldiers and the civilians who cater to them in cafés, barbershops, and military supply stores.
The new commander, Viktor Saprykin, is much younger than Fin—a hefty man with bristly dark hair and a scruffy beard. We meet in a café where I once met Fin, and much of what the young soldier tells me aligns with what I remember about my friend.
The soldiers who served with Fin revered him. “He was a decent, honest man,” Saprykin remembers, “fair, brave, responsible, always searching for better solutions, and always looking out for his men.” His number one goal was to “protect people”—his men and the civilians his unit was designed to keep safe. No detail was apparently too small—from making sure the men had enough time off to taking risks himself so they didn’t have to.
I also remember Fin’s determination to lead by example. The unit’s advanced technology allowed it to hijack the navigational system of an incoming drone and crash it before it could do any harm. Then, if the UAV’s explosive payload was intact, Fin would find it in the nearby fields or forest and defuse it. “It’s a job only an officer should do,” I recall him telling me. “I wouldn’t ask anyone else.”
His other passion, central to his mission to protect, was technological innovation. “He was always trying to do better,” Saprykin tells me—investigating new technologies, trying to acquire them for the unit, and adapting them for the changing battlefield. He enlisted me to connect with anyone I knew in the West—soldiers, tech companies, military authorities—who could provide the latest technology. He also complained bitterly about allies—companies and countries—who wouldn’t share.
His priorities: electronic warfare equipment, signal intelligence (SIGINT) software, advanced remote-control technology, and unmanned ground vehicles that could take over the toughest, most dangerous tasks now performed by him and his men. “He wanted to substitute robots for people,” Saprykin recalls. “That’s now the top goal across the Ukrainian armed forces, but he was way ahead.”
With new technology, Fin hoped, would come reform. Ever an entrepreneur, he chafed at central command and the hidebound rules that curtailed his work. He wanted to expand his company to battalion size—more men, more equipment, and a broader reach—to spread its innovative tactics and equipment. He thought the armed forces needed more layers of electronic anti-drone defenses and a flatter command structure to encourage bottom-up innovation.
He was also intent on sharing what he learned on the battlefield with like-minded military authorities in Western Europe. “Europe and the U.S. should start learning from us before it’s too late,” he warned me at our first meeting. “They’ll either learn from our experience, or they’ll learn on their own—the hard way.”
Saprykin remembers his sense of humor and his faith. I remember how much he enjoyed his work, despite the dangers. My phone is full of videos he sent me. Some are typical of those produced by Ukrainian frontline units—the destruction of an enemy target seen through the eyes of a Ukrainian drone, usually accompanied by pumping rock music. Others are more personal.
One three-and-a-half-minute clip, a single tracking shot filmed by a second, unseen man, shows a fatigue-clad figure in a tawny field under a brilliant blue sky—a perfect, crisp autumn day. Fin, in body armor and a helmet, kneels over a downed drone, and you can feel the tension as he defuses the device. Then he gets up and walks away briskly, followed by an explosion and some cursing by the cameraman. In the final frames, both men step into the shot to stamp out spreading flames. “On Sunday, we almost got blown up while demining an FPV drone,” Fin wrote. “But God is watching over us.”
On Fin’s last outing, Saprykin told me, my friend and a few other men made their way east from Sloviansk to the unit’s first line of defense, less than two miles from enemy lines. I imagine something like the field in the video, but by January, it would have been covered in snow and much colder. The men huddled in a trench for a few moments. Then Fin climbed out to inspect an electronic jamming device his unit had hidden in nearby brush.
The device was covered by protective netting, but an enemy drone stuffed with extra shrapnel waited for him in the canopy. Saprykin believes it was remotely controlled by a pilot at the other end of a fiber-optic cable—anti-drone units are a priority target for both sides. Fin raised his hand to his face to protect himself as the device exploded, but it was no use. Shrapnel tore through his body—first an arm, then his face and torso. He lived for a few minutes, but neither his men nor the medics at a nearby “stabilization point” could help him. A second soldier who accompanied him died three days later in a hospital in Dnipro.
Many 21st-century Westerners are nonplussed by the traditional belief that it’s honorable to die for one’s country. World War I poet Wilfred Owen called this notion “The old Lie.”
But wartime Ukraine is different. It’s not unusual to see people stop their cars and get out to kneel on the pavement when a soldier’s cortege passes, and I doubt Fin would have lived his life any differently even if he had known how it would end. Among other reasons, he knew exactly what he was fighting for and why it mattered. “Someday,” he wrote just weeks before he fell to a mutual friend in Germany, also an officer, “I hope we will be able to work or serve together for a free Europe.”
