This Book is a deeply personal story of a Russian man whose fate collapsed together with his country. Once an aerospace engineer, he loses his factory, his profession, and even his family after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Reduced to a warehouse laborer and stripped of purpose, he decides to go to war—not out of hatred, but in a desperate search for meaning, believing that only there he might still exist as someone. At the front, however, he finds no glory. Those called enemies speak his own language, pray with the same words, and mourn the same losses. He remembers his mandatory Soviet service, the Ukrainian fellow soldiers with whom he once shared bread and laughter—now, perhaps, standing across the battlefield. In this fractured brotherhood, war turns into a mirror of inner emptiness. During a drone strike of unknown origin, he is gravely wounded. Ironically, he feels saved—for he himself did not know what to do with the unarmed prisoner lying nearby. The machine decided for him. In the hospital, he meets a soldier whose skull and language have been split by war; he mixes Russian and Ukrainian words while his mother reads him old folk tales from the land where they both once grew up. Among bandages and delirium, the truth emerges: war is not a line between nations, but a void between human beings. After recovery, he is offered a path into power, but chooses differently: his factory is being rebuilt, and he returns to his tools — now manufacturing combat drones, the very ones that decide fates from the sky. His wife and children come back. Life resumes. Yet each night he wakes not to silence, but to the relentless approach of rotor blades and fire. He sees the drone descending… and cannot tell whether he is the one controlling it, or it is now controlling him. This story is not about politics or war. It is about a man caught between past and present, guilt and hope. It is a story of how easily we lose brotherhood— and how terrifying it is to realize that the deepest battlefield lies within the human soul.”