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SUMY

In July, I visit a special forces unit near Sumy in the north-east. A group of soldiers has returned from across the Russian border — wet, dirty, tired, yet satisfied. They review their GoPro and drone footage, read books, watch movies, eat and rest on couches, cleaning their weapons and chatting. I spend four days with them, watching them train and have fun by the nearby lake, joining in their volleyball games.

One day, during a game, we hear a distant but powerful noise. The servicemen take a quick glance up, and one of my teammates turns to me: “It’s Himars,” he says, referring to a rocket launcher used to strike Russian targets. “Come on, hit the ball!” A few days later, back in Kyiv, I discover that two of the guys I’d spent time with at the lake were killed on their next mission.

SUMY DRONE UNIT

At the top of a hill in a field of high fresh green wheat, a drone falls. It is not easy to find — the men have to use another drone to spot where it landed. These drones had been used a couple of days before, during the mission across the border. They imitate attacks to drive the Russian servicemen inside while sappers lay mines to cut off access to the main road.

KHARKIV CONTROL CENTRE

The Russian army occupied a piece of land in the north of the Kharkiv region in May. In the city of Kharkiv, there is an unremarkable building with shuttered windows. The entrance looks abandoned, but the door opens from inside when certain people want to enter. This is a base for the Khartia Brigade, a branch of the National Guard that was founded in Kharkiv in 2022. Inside, there is a drone workshop and an observation point to manage drones in the battlefield. Several large TV screens show around 20 video streams at the same time. There’s an active operation going on. Footage of the cratered soil being hit by thousands of projectiles moves slowly across the muted screens.

KHARKIV DRONE UNIT

The next day, late in the evening, I am taken by the large drones unit to where they are stationed. It is about 5km from the front line. We are meant to arrive and leave in the dark. The car looks like one from Mad Max, with steel sheets attached to it and several large radio-electronic warfare pylons on the roof. Because the front line is so near, the car speeds along the rough, narrow roads at more than 120kph, despite the darkness. At one point, we nearly crash into a tank. In the village, the guys set up antennas and a drone, then quickly move into a basement for launch. The Vampire drone is loud. Above us, the starry sky buzzes with different types of drones.

TSYRKUNY

In the middle of a hot day, we arrive at a sappers’ point, close to the front line. The sappers work with a huge range of ammunition, adapting them to attach to different types of drones. The ground is littered with explosive devices ready to be used. Some are homemade, from plastic bottles, some have been printed on a 3D printer. There are parts of an RPG-7 rocket launcher, some thermobaric vacuum bombs and other grenades. The sapper works carefully and confidently. He doesn’t talk much until I show him what I’ve drawn. Then he smiles.

Sergiy Maidukov’s work has appeared in the FT Magazine, as well as The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He was born in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, which is currently occupied by Russia and its militant proxies. Maidukov has been working with servicemen to cover the conflict

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A BRITISH mum has written an agonising letter to her daughter who has been held captive by Hamas for nearly a year.

Writing with a mix of grief and hope, Mandy Damari spoke of her hopes to intensify efforts to secure her daughter Emily’s release.

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Emily, who was taken during the devastating October 7 attacks last year, is the only known British hostage still in Gaza.

The 28-year-old’s life was shattered when Hamas terrorists abducted her from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, near the Gaza border, where she had been living.

During the assault, her beloved cockapoo, Choocha, was shot dead in her arms, and Emily herself suffered a gunshot wound to her hand before being taken hostage.

Mrs. Damari, 63, has been relentless in her campaign to free her daughter, traveling the globe and meeting with world leaders.

Despite these efforts, Emily remains in captivity, alongside over 100 other hostages.

As the anniversary of the attacks approaches, Mrs. Damari has expressed her mounting frustration, declaring that time is running out for her daughter.

“It is breaking my heart a little more, day by day,” she wrote.

“Soon there will be nothing left of my heart – or Emily.”

This week, in an act of desperation, Mrs. Damari traveled to Downing Street to deliver a personal letter to Prime Minister and Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer.

She urged him to use all available resources—diplomatic pressure, negotiations, and humanitarian efforts—to bring her daughter home.

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“We don’t need tea and sympathy,” she said.

“We need actions, not words.”

Her poignant letter contains a direct message to Emily, the Daily Mail reports.

“Please keep strong, keep praying and just be your beautiful self that I love to the moon and back,” she wrote, adding, “You will come home.”

She signed off as “Mum who is always right,” referencing a tattoo Emily has in honour of her.

Mrs. Damari’s tireless activism reflects the agony of a parent who has been left disillusioned and panicked, feeling let down by the British government.

After a recent meeting with Sir Keir, she wrote of her frustration, questioning why she has had to plead for action.

“They are supposed to be intelligent people… aren’t the answers obvious to them?” she asked.

Her frustration deepened after learning about the execution of six hostages by Hamas, including Eden Yerushalmi, a young woman just four years younger than Emily, who had been starved and brutally killed.

On Monday, the world will mark a year since the October 7 attacks, when Hamas terrorists launched an unprecedented assault, killing 1,200 people in what has been described as the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

It comes as…

Yet, as Mrs. Damari points out, many in the UK remain unaware that a British citizen is still being held hostage.

Tomorrow, Mrs. Damari will continue her campaign with a speech in London’s Hyde Park, calling on the British government to do more.

Her message is clear: time is running out, and her daughter’s life hangs in the balance.

It comes as Israel wiped out 250 Hezbollah terrorists in just four days since the invasion into Lebanon, says the nation’s military.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are continuing to fight on multiple fronts across the Middle East with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei even defending Hamas’ October 7 massacre today.

Israel launched their ground offensive into Lebanon this week as they continue to look to eliminate Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah from the Middle East.

The IDF announced the precise operations have already wrecked the Iranian proxy – blasting militants, weapons sites and infrastructure.

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Their ground offensive was met with a strong reaction from arch rivals Iran who have invested billions in Hezbollah to train them up to help fight their battles.

Israel also says they have eliminated the “top three tiers” of Hezbollah’s terror leadership.

Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant pledged “more surprises in store” for Hezbollah after the assassination of their leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Gallant said: “Hezbollah is receiving very severe blows, one after the other.”

So far, ground clashes between Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants have been confined to a narrow strip along the border.

At least nine Israeli soldiers have been killed in battles as troops are advancing in southern Lebanon trying to wipe out Hezbollah fighters.

The new wave of strikes came after Israel issued another evacuation order for communities across southern Lebanon.

Thousands of civilians have already fled the country’s south as the showdown between Hezbollah and Israel intensifies.

Israel expanded its no-go zone and told citizens to urgently leave 25 areas.

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A strange week in Britain, when various things we had banished from memory came back to haunt us: cold weather, Phillip Schofield and — most surprisingly of all — the Conservative party.

Ah, the Tories! Their annual conference was a buoyant affair. Were they contrite about the state of the UK? No, it’s Labour’s fault. “Listen, they have had 14 years to prepare for government. Where’s the vision?” Robert Jenrick, frontrunner for the Tory leadership, told the faithful. Jenrick boasts about his parents’ ties to the metals industry — they certainly produced one incredible brass neck.

The conference motif was verbs beginning “re-”. Renew. Rebuild. Although not remember. Indeed the party exhibited the short-term memory loss associated with a severe blow to the head, which I suppose is what they suffered in July’s election. Tory members are not interested in a clear-eyed view of the past, which is lucky as they’re the target market for Boris Johnson’s memoir.

Their last proper leadership contest, won by Liz Truss in 2022, was described to me by an MP as “a circular firing squad composed of people without any weapons training”. That description doesn’t fit this time. First, two of the candidates have weapons training (James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat are both ex-forces). Second, it’s clear that leadership contests are what the Tories do best. In fact, the party should streamline itself and make them its main product offering, the way Marks and Spencer seems to basically just sell food.

Jenrick is pitching himself as the new Johnson, and committed to the part by getting several basic facts wrong. He said he’s in politics for “the people for whom there is no pressure group pressing their cases”. Just in case you thought he was the same Robert Jenrick who approved a planning application for billionaire Richard Desmond after sitting next to him at a party fundraiser.

Jenrick is probably the candidate voters would most like to go for a drink with, in the sense that they definitely couldn’t handle the conversation sober. He wants Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights: “It boils down to this: it’s leave or remain.” Hmm, any precedent for such a straight choice backfiring?

It was too much for some of his colleagues. “I am very sorry to have to say it, but that speech of Robert Jenrick’s was lazy, mendacious, simplistic tripe,” said fellow Conservative MP Jesse Norman. Yes! No other party does infighting so well.

Norman supports Kemi Badenoch, the former business secretary who recently claimed: “I never have gaffes . . . I never have to clarify.” This week, she criticised maternity pay and suggested up to 50,000 civil servants “should be in prison”.

Cleverly, former foreign and home secretary, is the sensible contender: he’s on record joking about the date rape drug Rohypnol, but only once. “Let’s be more normal,” he told the conference.

Not yet, James. The Tories are where they were in 1997 and 2001, and where Labour were in 2010 and 2015: they don’t want to be normal, they want to be themselves. We were treated to four candidates talking about leadership, while being unable to admit that Brexit was folly, that the climate transition has fewer costs than the alternative and that, while we’d all like low taxes, someone has to pay for pensions and elderly care.

George Orwell wrote that poverty brought relief: “You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.” So it is with opposition. Under their next leader, the Conservatives may or may not ape Nigel Farage’s policies. But already they have imbibed Farage’s main lesson: politics is much more bearable if you forget about the realities of governing.

henry.mance@ft.com

Charles Dean loved living in his South Carolina neighborhood, with its manicured lawns and towering trees. It reminded him of his childhood growing up in a family that has run a lumber business since the early 1900s.

It was one of those giant trees that ended up killing him when Hurricane Helene whipped through Greenville last week and uprooted a red oak that crashed into his apartment.

But rather than discarding the tree, his relatives plan to use some of its wood to craft a beautiful bench, table, or other pieces of furniture and donate them to one of the drug recovery centers where Charles touched many lives, brother Matthew Dean said.

“Charles helped a lot of people who were alcoholics and drug addicts, and if there is something we can get out of this, is that there’s always hope. There is always hope,” he said.

Days of rain saturated the ground, and as the storm reached the Southeast it whipped up strong winds that uprooted trees and utility poles throughout the region.

Dean is among the more than 200 people confirmed dead in one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history. Many died crushed by trees that fell on homes or cars. The dead in South Carolina include grandparents found hugging one another after a fallen tree killed them in their home and two firefighters who died when a tree fell on their truck.

As the storm approached on Sept. 27, Charles Dean texted his family to say he could hear trees coming down outside as Helene battered the town.

“In the middle of it now, scary,” he texted his brother Matthew and his sister-in-law, who were checking on him from 300 miles (480 kilometers) away in North Carolina.

“It’s like mom and dad’s old neighborhood trees, all old-growth trees, and they’re going down, frightening,” he added.

A short time later, the red oak, about 70 feet (21 meters) tall and 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter, crashed into the second-story apartment, killing him.

“We told him we loved him, and he said that he loved us, and that was the last message we had with him,” Matthew Dean said.

The oldest of five brothers, Charles Dean, 59, loved to travel and visited much of Europe. One of his favorite trips was a safari in Africa, but Spain was among the countries he loved the most.

He was a fan of Barbra Streisand and Elizabeth Taylor and kept up with news about the British royal family.

Dean also loved to cook and bake and watch political news, which he called “pure theater.” He often sent text messages to family about the latest political scandal, his brother said.

He moved to Greenville in 2011 and began working as a drug addiction counselor — a recovering alcoholic, he found hope in helping others, according to his brother. On weekends Dean also worked at a home improvement store.

“Never in a million years did we expect to lose Charles,” Matthew Dean said. “He was so healthy and so vibrant and had years to live.”

The Biden administration has tried and failed to contain fighting in the Middle East over the past year – and now, the conflict is close to spiralling into all-out war. The FT’s US foreign affairs and defence correspondent Felicia Schwartz and US political news editor Derek Brower join this week’s Swamp Notes to explain what Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are telling voters they’ll do to end the conflict.

Mentioned in this podcast:

Israel and Iran have just delivered the US election’s ‘October surprise’

Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘rope-a-dope’ war strategy with White House

Oil surges after Joe Biden’s comments on Israeli retaliation

Sign up for the FT’s Swamp Notes newsletter here

Swamp Notes is produced by Ethan Plotkin, Sonja Hutson, Lauren Fedor and Marc Filippino. Topher Forhecz is the FT’s executive producer. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson.

CREDIT: USA Today

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