From: Transform Ukraine By Douglas Landro / September 10, 2025
September 9, 2025: The morning Polish fighter jets opened fire on Russian drones, the war in Ukraine transformed from a regional conflict into something far more dangerous
On a gray Tuesday morning in September 2025, Maria Kowalski was brewing her morning coffee in Warsaw when air raid sirens began wailing across Poland’s capital. Within hours, Polish and Dutch F-35 fighters had shot down Russian military drones—the first time since World War II that NATO forces had directly engaged Russian military assets in combat.
Meanwhile, 800 kilometers to the east, 82-year-old Petro Marchenko stood in line at the post office in Yarova village, waiting to collect his monthly pension of 3,000 hryvnias—about $80. At precisely 11 a.m., a Russian missile ended his life and those of 23 other Ukrainian pensioners in what officials called “pure terrorism.”
This is the story of September 9, 2025—the day when two parallel dramas unfolded that would reshape the war in Ukraine and possibly the future of European security.
The Arithmetic of Death
To understand what happened that Tuesday, you need to grasp a chilling mathematical reality that had been evolving for months. Russian generals had cracked a code that American Civil War officers would have recognized: how to capture territory while spending fewer soldiers’ lives.
In the brutal spring of 2025, Russian forces were losing 99 men for every square kilometer they captured in Ukraine. By summer, they had cut that number to just 68. It might sound like an abstract improvement, but it represented a revolution in how Moscow fought its war.
The secret weapon wasn’t a new tank or missile—it was swarms of drones operated by a shadowy organization called the Rubikon Center. Imagine thousands of flying robots, controlled by operators sitting safely dozens of kilometers behind the front lines, methodically hunting Ukrainian positions like a deadly video game played for real.
Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi announced that day that Russia had lost 299,210 soldiers since January alone—nearly 300,000 human beings reduced to a statistic. Yet Moscow’s military machine was becoming more efficient at its grim work, a fact that terrified Ukrainian commanders who understood what it meant for the war’s trajectory.
The Pensioners’ Last Day
While military analysts studied casualty ratios in air-conditioned offices, real people were living and dying in ways that statistics cannot capture. In Yarova, a village so small it barely appears on most maps, elderly residents had developed a routine that Russian intelligence had been watching.
Voice of Ukraine 