Yevhen Pronin: ‘If we do not kill them, they can kill our children’

Like many of those going to the European athletics championships in Munich this week Yevhen Pronin recently posted a video of himself on Instagram. But the clip had a surreal twist: the 31-year-old, acting president of Ukraine’s athletics federation, was wearing military fatigues. And he was running not for time but from bullets and explosions in Donetsk.

There will be plenty of stories from these championships over the next week, with Britain hoping for a glut of medals from Dina Asher-Smith, Laura Muir, Jake Wightman and others. However, none will be as remarkable as the one told by Pronin. Six months ago he was a lawyer and sports official. Now he has earned such a reputation for flying drones that he has a bounty on his head.

“We drop bombs not just on Russian tanks but Russian cars and on houses where they are situated,” he says. “We have drones with some small bombs, maybe 300 grams, for example. It’s impossible to crush a tank. You can only kill soldiers. But some of the bombs have great power.”

He points to one of his videos. “I show you this – two Russian soldiers here, so I drop the bomb here, like a basketball as you see. The machine moves here and crushes them, so they died.”

When Pronin is asked how he feels about this, he is unequivocal. “I feel great because I am doing this for my country. If we do not kill them, they can kill our children, they can kill us. But of course I’m not a killer in real life.”

Like many Ukrainians, Pronin signed up for the army immediately after the invasion, amid fears his country could be overrun in days. “Emotionally I’m in a stable place. But February 25 I was in a bad situation. The Russians were 10 minutes from my home and I remember my girlfriend crying. And then I opened