Occupied from the air. How border farmers live and work under shelling

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine lost almost 20% of the sown area. This means that more than five million hectares of arable land are not being used. Some fields are mined, some are under constant shelling, and some are under occupation. The war has hit farms in the border regions, particularly in Sumy, hard. Local farmers lose equipment and warehouses due to shelling, are killed or injured, but still continue to work and go to the fields – despite the direct risk to their lives.

Read about how anti-drone nets, REBs, body armor, and smoothbore shotguns to protect against FPV have become commonplace for Sumy farmers in a LIGA.net report.

A son will save his father

Oleksandr Ivanchenko is a farmer from the village of Yastrubyne in Sumy Oblast, five kilometers from the Russian border. He cultivates 800 hectares, some of which are close to Russia. In quiet times, he had 35 employees, but now, during the war, he has only 12.

For the previous three years of the war, the farmers of Yastrubyne had no problems growing and harvesting crops. But on August 6, 2024, the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched a raid into the Kursk region of Russia, which lasted eight months until March 2025. on January 10, 2025, the Russians launched an offensive in Sumy region and managed to capture several settlements. But Ukrainians are constantly counterattacking. The fighting continues.

A real war has come to these lands. And it was in 2025 that Russian drones started killing Ukrainian villagers along the border, destroying buildings, etc. So this year, we were only able to sow the fields and treat them with chemicals once.

When flying into Ukrainian territory, drones are primarily looking for military equipment, guns, and ammunition depots. But if the battery runs out and the target is not found, the drone becomes a deadly threat to civilians.

"When the battery is running low and the operator hasn't found anything military, in the last minutes he hunts for villagers, tractor crews, grain warehouses. All our roofs were destroyed, our equipment was damaged, but we still go (to the farms abandoned due to shelling – LIGA.net) to try to take out what survived and can be repaired," says Oleksandr.

Due to constant attacks by drones and heavy weapons, the border villages of Sumy region have been depopulated. Most of the population evacuated inland. Farmers have also left their homes. But they can't leave their untended fields, so they still make trips there.

"We're just used to the land, and we don't know any other work – it's very hard to change," Oleksandr says. His first visit to the sowing season was when he was 12 years old, and he recalls how his father took him with him:

"We spent the night in the car in sleeping bags. I helped put grain into the seeder and tried to drive the truck. Now that I have a 16-year-old son, I also take him to the field with me. We go with a drone analyzer and a gun at the ready. People reproach me: you put your child in danger, you don't feel sorry for him. But I do – I don't take him every time. It is important for me that he knows how bread is produced. And that he could run away from the drone, hide in the landing. And, in case of emergency, to quickly slip through and take me away from the field. So that he knows all our paths and secrets. A son will save his father, someone else may not," Oleksandr says.

He is always thinking that the danger may become even worse, and these "guerrilla raids" on the fields will become impossible and meaningless. "If I can't do what I do best, I will join the army. Growing bread comes first. The second is to protect my land so that our children can grow bread," says the farmer.

"It was an obvious crime"

But not all border farmers are ready to put themselves in danger, not all believe in EWs and anti-drone nets.

- "It all comes down to one thing," says farmer Ivan Koropets, sounding pessimistic, "The drone hit our combine not even in the cab, but in the grain bunker, killing one person and injuring another. You can't cover the whole combine with nets anyway. And REBs are powerless against fiber-optic FPV drones.

- So what should you do?" I ask.

- No, we didn't. We left our fields with an unharvested crop and a broken combine," the farmer says sadly.

Ivan and Olha Koroptsi are a couple from the village of Obody, a kilometer from the Russian border. They started their farm in 2006 after they got married. They started with their own vegetable gardens and two hectares of land from the state for individual farming. For almost two decades, they have already operated 1100 hectares of leased land and have amassed a considerable fleet of machinery. However, they didn't have their own combine harvester – they used a rented one. That's what the Russian drone hit.

"It happened on July 21, 2024, shortly before the Ukrainian Armed Forces started fighting in the Kursk region," Olha recalls. "The harvest was in full swing. At that time, her husband was acting as an assistant harvester. In the afternoon, he left for lunch, and our tractor driver Ruslan drove up to the combine to pick up grain. He sat down in my husband's empty seat to cool off from the heat, because the combine has air conditioning, but the tractor does not. A few minutes later, he died – the combine was hit by a drone. It was a terrible death. Ruslan was like family to us – he had been working with us from the very beginning for twenty years."

More than a year has passed since that tragedy. The Koroptsy family is still dealing with this loss.

"When the Russians hit schools, kindergartens, hangars, and just houses, they say that Ukrainian soldiers are hiding there. But there are definitely no soldiers in the cab of a working combine! It was an obvious crime against civilians, and there is no need to prove anything," Ivan reflects.

The Koroptsy left their home and farm and settled in Sumy. They took their farm equipment with them. They earn money by renting it out or working on it themselves on orders from other farms.

Eventually, almost the entire village left – four people remained. One of them, a man in his 60s, recently called Olha. He said that he had come to a nearby town to buy gasoline and charged his cell phone for the first time in almost a year – there is no electricity in the village. Now he is calling his friends. He says he hasn't seen a single Russian soldier in the village in all this time – they don't come in: "People were driven out, the village was devastated, and... they don't come in..." He eats vegetables, milk, and poultry – he is not hungry, although he misses bread. But he does not want to leave either – he does not want to leave his home and his animals. The fields with unharvested crops are overgrown with weeds, and the broken combine is rusting.

"I lost 20 years of my life in seven minutes"

The village of Terny in the Romny district of Sumy region is located 40 kilometers in a straight line from the Russian border. At the peak of its development in the Soviet years, it was a powerful town: in addition to farmers, there were two factories (sugar and brick), three schools, a hospital, and two cultural centers. At the beginning of the Great War, Terny found itself under Russian occupation, which lasted eight days.

The farm of local farmer Leonid Mosha survived an attack by Russian drones on the night of May 28-29, 2025. Three months have passed, but the consequences of the destruction are still being felt here and now.

The charred skeleton of a John Deere tractor with a seeder attached still stands there. Twisted roofing iron is piled in an uneven heap and glistens in the sun. There is not a single roof that survived. What is not destroyed is damaged.

Near the wall of the grain warehouse, there is a pile of collected wreckage from Russian Shahed attack drones.

"The first explosion occurred around 1 a.m., followed by a series of explosions in five to seven minutes," Leonid recalls. "There were ten Shaheds in total. In just 15-20 minutes, my farming friends and fellow villagers came to the area. They were clearing the wreckage and pulling it apart to allow fire trucks to pass. They took out the surviving equipment. Well, relatively survived – the one that could move. There were no intact windows – there was not a single intact glass on any cab. The damage to the equipment alone amounted to 20 million hryvnias, as well as losses to buildings and products in warehouses. "The Shahideen were equipped with thermobaric charges (a volumetric explosion charge that creates a powerful shock wave – LIGA.net), and they were very damaging."

The fire was extinguished, and when the farmer saw the full picture at dawn – the smoking ruins – he felt even more pain:

"I suddenly realized that the loss was not only in money, but also in years: 20 years of my life. From those first months, when I started with a few hectares – my own, my father's and those leased by my friends – to today's almost 1000 hectares. Everything was collected, built, and brought to a closed cycle in small drops," says Leonid.

Despite the losses, the farm continues to operate. The work was organized in two shifts in order to load more equipment (which is now less) and meet deadlines.

"I am applying for a loan for a new seeder. This is one of the most necessary things to sow in a short time and not have to wait in line for a rental. Every day of delay means less harvest. A spoon is good for lunch," says Leonid Mosha. In recent years, he has been growing peas, sunflower and rapeseed. There are no problems with the sale of these crops.

"It's a good thing there were no people at the time of the explosion"

In Terny, farmer Volodymyr Karpenko also suffered from Russian shelling: a rocket destroyed his grain dryer, warehouses, part of his crops, and damaged his equipment.

"It happened on my birthday on May 30. The explosion was so powerful that the chandelier in the room fell. And this is despite the fact that I live 500 meters from the farm. I immediately realized that it came for us. But I didn't go there in the middle of the night – what happened happened. In the morning I saw the whole picture. The police and rescue service arrived. They said it was an Iskander-M missile," Volodymyr recalls.

The Iskander-M is a powerful weapon with up to 700 kilograms of explosive and can create a crater 15 meters in diameter and seven meters deep. In Volodymyr's farm, the explosion "folded" all the buildings, including a grain warehouse with reinforced concrete supports. The iron supports of the grain dryer bent like plasticine.

"My first thought was that it was good that there were no people on the territory that night, no one was hurt. After another farmer's farm in our village was hit, we refused to have a guard. Before that, we hid the equipment in the bushes 200-300 meters from the epicenter of the explosion. But it was still damaged – nine cars were cut by shrapnel and the windows were smashed. We have incurred losses of up to UAH 30 million," says Volodymyr.

The loss of the grain dryer could have hit Karpenko's business hard. But he quickly found a way out. To avoid paying rent for drying and storing grain, he teamed up with another farmer, and together they applied for a grant for a mobile dryer so that they could store their grain in plastic sleeves. There was no need to build new warehouses.

In addition to selling grain, Volodymyr plans to earn money by drying grain for other farmers in Sumy region.

On compensation and farming luck

Despite the fact that farmers are leaving the border villages and the fields are constantly shelled by Russians, it is difficult for farmers to expect compensation for their losses. According to them, officials often answer that only farmers whose land was under occupation can claim benefits and compensation.

"Occupation means when the enemy's boots will definitely set foot on my land? But we are already occupied from the air!" Leonid Mosha bitterly ironizes.

So farmers complain: taxes remain mandatory for them in full, and fines for delays in reporting have not changed either, although it is much harder to run a business under fire.

The same Volodymyr Karpenko said that he was fined for violating traffic rules when he drove his agricultural machinery onto a public road to hide it from missiles and "shahed" fighters.

Tax benefits for farmers who are already working include: owners of farms located in the area of active hostilities, under occupation or mined are exempt from paying land tax and minimum tax liability; owners of facilities damaged or destroyed due to hostilities are exempt from real estate tax.

In the state budget for 2025 to support farmers provided for more than UAH six billion, including for land demining, preferential loans and subsidies, etc. And in Sumy region, for the first time in Ukraine, by order of the Military Executive Committee the status of an affected small business entity. With this status, entrepreneurs will be able to receive tax benefits and pay less for utilities. They may be exempt from administrative fees and partially exempt from paying fees for obtaining permits and licenses.

And yet, farmers say, legislative initiatives are not always backed by clear mechanisms for their implementation.

So there are two ways for farmers to change their business profile, or to stay in agribusiness, relying on their own strength and intelligence.

Many choose the second path.

Oleksandr Ivanchenko, whose 800 hectares of land are almost close to the border with Russia, and his hired workers are still harvesting. They wrap their combines in anti-drone nets, take first aid kits, smoothbore anti-drone rifles and ammunition, put on helmets and body armor, and head out to the harvest. They believe in luck and farming skills.