My last day in Kyiv. The city feels like a beautiful woman with a black eye, defiant but bruised. They’re kicking me out, the suits back home muttering about “escalation” and “unnecessary risk.” In this goddamn carnival of chaos? This is where the story is, buried under rubble and screaming into the night sky. But orders are orders, even if they smell faintly of stale fear and cheap rotgut that makes your teeth hurt.
One last run. Had to see something up close. The spot where the North Korean special delivery landed. A residential block, they said. Not a military target, not a factory, just simply a home to its many residents until the night of April 24th.
Ground Zero: Pyongyang’s Calling Card in Kyiv
The air still tasted like pulverized concrete and something acrid, metallic. Not the clean smell of rain, but the dirty, final smell of things being unmade. The building wasn’t just hit; it was bitten. A gaping maw torn out of the side of a multi-story apartment block, like some colossal, blind beast had taken a chunk out of it. Rebar twisted out like grotesque metal spaghetti, concrete dust coated everything in a grim, grey shroud. Emergency lights pulsed blue and red, a frantic, silent disco of despair.
People milled around, faces etched with that particular blend of shock and numb exhaustion you see too much of here. They weren’t screaming anymore, just… existing. Picking through debris, staring blankly at the void where their lives used to be. One old woman sat on an overturned bucket, clutching a single, muddy boot like it was a newborn child. Her eyes were wide, seeing things I couldn’t. “Loud,” she whispered when I asked her what happened. “So loud. Bang. Fire” she gesticulates the explosion. Another man, younger, with dust caked in his beard, just shook his head. “Chaos,” he muttered, echoing the official reports I’d skimmed. “Just chaos. One minute you’re sleeping, the next… this.”
From Flowers to Foreign Parts: Gonzo report
And there, amidst the wreckage, a splash of color. Flowers. Piles of them. Bouquets wilting slightly in the cool spring air. They were laid out formally, almost reverently. I saw the ribbons – official ones. Zelensky was here. Other leaders too, leaving their floral tributes to the dead. Twelve confirmed dead, they said. Ninety injured, including kids. Twelve lives snuffed out by a goddamn missile from North Korea. A KN-23, they called it. A one-tonne warhead, delivered courtesy of the “criminal alliance” between Moscow and Pyongyang. Criminal? That’s putting it mildly. It felt more like a cosmic farce, a sick, twisted punchline delivered with explosive force.
Later, I heard whispers about the guts of the thing. The missile wasn’t just North Korean steel; it was a Frankenstein’s monster of global capitalism. Parts from everywhere. Over a hundred bits and pieces from U.S. companies alone, they claimed. Think about that. Your tax dollars, potentially ending up in a circuit board that guides a tin-pot dictator’s rocket into a Kyiv apartment. The sheer, mind-bending madness of it all. The global supply chain of death, humming along, delivering destruction right to your doorstep. It makes you want to laugh, or maybe just curl up in a ball and chew on the rebar.
The Night Hunt: Choppers and the Fear in the Sky over Kyiv
Just as the grey light began to fade, painting the wrecked building in bruised purples and oranges, my phone buzzed. A contact. Sasha. Used to run with the Foreign Legion boys, now doing… other things. “They’re sending me east,” he rasped, voice tight. “Frontline. You know I can’t take you!” My stomach dropped again. That was the ticket, the real dirt. Gone. “But,” he continued, “there’s a crew. Air defense. Choppers. Hunting the buzzing bastards. Outskirts. Tonight. You want in?”
Did I want in? Did the suits back home have spines? Was this whole goddamn war a mainline injection of pure madness? Of course, I wanted in. A night ride with the sky cops, trying to swat mechanical mosquitoes out of the air during another barrage. The report mentioned Ukrainian forces shooting down drones and missiles, the KN-23s and cruise missiles, but was vague on the how. Sasha’s call offered a glimpse into one of the hows, or at least, the attempt.
Hours later, the world was a smear of black and distant city lights. The helicopter felt flimsy, a tin can with rotors, vibrating with nervous energy. The crew were young, jumpy, eyes glued to screens and the inky blackness outside, occaisionally darting to photos of their families nestled between the instrumentation. A glance the only motivation they need. The air crackled with radio chatter, a frantic symphony of warnings and vectors. “Target bearing zero-niner-zero!” someone yelled over the engine noise. “Possible Shahed! Low altitude!”
The Airborne Hunt for Shadows in the Skies Above Kyiv
We banked hard. Below, the city lights flickered, occasionally punctuated by the sharp, blinding flash of air defense fire from the ground. Boom. Boom. Boom. A constant, terrifying rhythm. The report the next day said there were “no reports available” about an attack on the 27th, but let me tell you, from where I was hanging in the sky, something was definitely happening. Sirens wailed, a mournful chorus rising from the streets below. The wail of the city’s fear. The sound of a city under siege, again, and in a couple of days the news reports will catch up.
The crew scanned, scopes sweeping the darkness. Hunting ghosts. These drones, these cheap, buzzing irritants, were the new terror. Sent in waves, designed to exhaust air defenses, to slip through the cracks, to find another residential block, another power station, another piece of civilian life to shatter. Shooting them down from a helicopter felt like trying to catch flies with a greased net while riding a bucking bronco. Dangerous, chaotic, and probably less effective than the ground batteries, but they were trying. Desperate measures in a desperate fight.
This Gonzo Ride Ends, But Kyiv Calls Back
We didn’t get a confirmed kill that night. Saw a few blips, heard the chatter, felt the tension coil and release with every false alarm or distant explosion. But the experience was the story. The sheer, raw fear mixed with grim determination in the eyes of the crew. The vulnerability of being airborne during a missile and drone attack, with the sound of ordinance slicing, close by, through the night sky, and detonating. Every explosion lighting up the sky we hope a success, every fireball on the ground a soul scorching failure. The city holding its breath against the next incoming piece of flying scrap metal from some back alley in Pyongyang.
Leaving Kyiv feels like abandoning a patient mid-surgery. The wounds are deep, the chaos is a goddamn virus, and the absurdity of it all – North Korean missiles, American parts, helicopter flyswatters – is enough to drive a sane man mad. But then, who ever said Gonzo journalism was about sanity? It’s about the ride. And this ride, this terrifying, exhilarating, heartbreaking ride through the heart of a war-torn capital, is one I won’t forget. The fear is real. The chaos is absolute. And the story, god help us, is far from over.
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