Since last year, she has built 150 first-person view drones (commonly known as FPVs) and repaired hundreds of others, including a Russian-made drone recovered by the Ukrainian military after it crashed on the front lines.
She raised more than $200,000 to buy drone parts from China, mostly through online donations, but she and her husband, an IT professional, also used some of their own money.
FPVs are civilian drones redesigned by Ukrainian soldiers to carry explosives that have transformed the battlefield in Ukraine and are widely deployed on both sides. The drones are small enough to maneuver into trenches and catch enemy forces by surprise, but their use has increased in recent months as Ukraine runs out of shells and other munitions as it waits for help from the West, including the United States. It has become even more important.
The operator fires a handheld device from a position behind the front lines and uses goggles and a remote control to fly into enemy territory and guide it to Russian targets, killing infantry and destroying equipment. Russia has realized the effectiveness of FPV and is now mass producing it for its military.
Ukraine also starts manufacturing FPV Although the factory is producing 1 million drones this year, with the promise of producing 1 million drones this year, many of the drones sent to Ukraine's military are made by people in the country. Civilians do not handle the explosives, and they are only attached to the drones after they are delivered to the front lines. One advantage of crowdsourcing is that it is decentralized, and private homes are less vulnerable to Russian missile attacks than large military factories.
Instead of complex assembly lines, volunteers are turning their spaces into makeshift drone workshops. Magdalina calls her home office her “drone room.” The FPVs are stacked next to other supplies used to build the drones, including soldering irons, copper wire, pliers, screwdrivers, acid, and zip ties used by soldiers to attach bombs.
A grassroots group called SocialDrone is among the local efforts teaching hundreds of volunteers how to build drones, sharing online a list of components to purchase and written instructions on how to assemble them . The group also released a detailed bird's-eye view of the process on his YouTube video, which has been viewed more than 400,000 times since November.
Once the volunteers have completed building the FPV, they send it to the group to vigorously test the homemade drone before transporting it to the front lines. Drone manufacturers can request devices to be sent to specific soldiers or units, including their own friends and family, or let SocialDrone select the desired brigade.
“A DIY FPV drone that costs around 250 euros can do the same job as a 70,000 euro one-shot javelin,” the group's website states.
Oleksii Asanov, an IT worker and co-founder of SocialDrone, never intended to get into drone manufacturing.
Asanov, who has been active as a volunteer since the early days of the 2022 invasion of Russia, has also established other projects to support soldiers on the front lines. One will send them a drone launch system, and the other will train soldiers as drone pilots in a 10-day intensive course.
After the first troops graduated from his school, they complained that they returned to the front lines with new technology but no drones. Given the intensity of combat, troops often deploy five or more of his FPVs on missions, using them as suicide weapons to fly toward targets. This kind of disposability means there is a constant demand for new drones.
Asanov said Ukraine must continue meeting this demand if it is to have a chance in the war. “It seems to me that this war will end with FPV drones,” he said.
Thirteen-year-old Yang found a YouTube video about building a drone. He grew up playing with Legos and other building toys, so he thought building an FPV wouldn't be that difficult.
His parents helped him buy parts, but he didn't want to work on building a drone on school nights. As a result, it takes about five hours a day to assemble on Saturdays and Sundays. He has worked on four of his drones so far, and the school has promised to help him build more if he continues.
“I'm angry at my enemies, but I'm also happy,” he said. “I'm interested in what I'm doing. It's a new hobby.”
Every weekend, dozens of volunteers test drones in parks and fields around Kiev.
On a recent Saturday, Cairillo, 32, and Dennis, 23, sorted through a pile of donated drones and took them flying one at a time.
The two are wounded former soldiers. They are currently conducting quality control tests on his SocialDrone, running the drone through complex maneuvers to ensure the device does not disintegrate. A water bottle filled with sand was also installed to simulate the weight of explosives, allowing each FPV sent to the front line to be equipped with a weapon.
In between tests, they helped another volunteer, Anna, 33, practice flying. Anna, a mobile product marketer working on her app, said in January she overheard one of SocialDrone's co-founders talking about the project in a shared workspace and immediately decided to I participated as a volunteer. She now spends so much time working on her drone that “it's like another full-time job,” she said.
“I never thought I would see a moment where someone dies, so I'm really happy,” Magdalina said. But her war changed her.
“I'm glad they died with my help,” she said of enemy Russian soldiers. “Because tomorrow they won't kill us.”