Flight Club: How a 21-Year-Old Ukrainian Soldier Turns His Film Skills Into Drone War Training

Every Friday, after their last class, students at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI) gather to celebrate the end of the week in one of the parks on the vast campus. The scene could be anywhere in a Western University: groups laughing, passing around a mic to sing Okean Elzy  or Michael Jackson, arms full of cheap drinks from the corner shop.

In the middle of the crowd, eyes buried in his phone, stands Vadym Adamov. He could pass for any student here, but his military jacket tells another story. To varying degrees, every Ukrainian student is being hit hard by Russia’s war, but Vadym is striking back. Once a filmmaker, he is now a veteran soldier and drone operator who uses his free time to tour Ukraine and Europe and share frontline lessons with his “Flight Club” project.

From film sets to the frontline trenches

Vadym is 21 today, but could already have lived ten lives, given how little what he has experienced over these three years of war fits his age. With his friend Bohdan, a student at the KPI Faculty of Radio Engineering, all he talks about that evening is the future—drones, upcoming conferences, and editing a promo video. Vadym seems to slip into the rhythm of this campus party, even though he has never been a student.

I turned 18 a few weeks before the full-scale invasion. I wanted to be a film director. But after getting my sister and mother to safety abroad, I enlisted right away.

Vadym Adamov

In January 2022, he had just released his first major project: a music video for the Ukrainian rock band Zwyntar, shot with a crew of nearly 100. He was 17. Weeks later, he found himself defending Kyiv with no training. “A crew of nearly 100 people, a real budget,” he said, “It was a good start, and I was only 17.”

Adamov embodies many traits of a Ukrainian identity forged by war. Since February 2022, he has served as a mortar operator and later as a drone operator in Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Zaporizhzhia. Like hundreds of thousands of others, he faced Russia’s assaults head-on—once described as the “world’s second-strongest army”. Yet he never stopped filming. Between rotations, he made short films and, above all, began preparing civil society for a new scale of war.

Adamov has dozens of anecdotes he uses to grab the attention of student audiences far removed from traditional military codes. Like the time in 2022 when, confronted with the reality of having to operate a mortar, the only thing he had to complete his training was an old manual from the early 20th century.

Even if I’ve never had the chance to test it, I now know how to mount a mortar on a horse-drawn cart!

Vadim Adamov

Directing versus commanding

That’s why, maybe, Adamov quickly took the path of the drones. Because drones are for him, first and foremost, the eyes of the battlefield. For mortar operators, Adamov says, the enemy used to be just coordinates. With the advent of drones, results are now visible in real time. He thus promptly asked to train on drones, to become an aerial reconnaissance operator. “Drones are the only formal training I’ve ever completed in my life.” says Adamov, “My only diploma.”

And his film background surely shaped how he adapted to the war.

On set, when you’re a director, you sit with a walkie-talkie in front of a monitor and give orders to technicians and actors. In Bakhmut, for me, it felt the same, same walkie-talkie, same monitor—except there you don’t get a second take.

Vadim Adamov

“We win with technology”: Victory Drones’ vision

Today, drones seem to dominate the war. By 2025, dozens of Ukrainian companies and brigades offer free courses to military and civilians. But in 2022, it was still the beginning.

At a conference Adamov organized in April 2025, one wounded veteran-speaker featured in Adamov’s programme summed it up: “If we had used drones in 2023 the way we do today, the counteroffensive wouldn’t have failed.”

Adamov credits Maria Berlinska, founder of Victory Drones, for recognizing this earlier than anyone. A scholar-turned-soldier, Berlinska pushed to integrate civil tech, industry, and the military and promote affordable, dual-use innovations back in 2015. Her motto: “We win with technology, not people.”

I never could have said drones would become so central to the war before I learned it for myself at the front.

Vadym Adamov

“Flight Club” shows how civilian skills support Ukraine’s defense

Vadym, too, realized how essential it is to find ways to motivate society to sustain the spirit of resistance and the readiness of a population exhausted by so many years of war.

In 2024, while at the Zaporizhzhia front, south of Ukraine, Adamov was invited to speak to students in Kyiv. His commander gave him two days—just enough to tend to a wounded comrade, prepare Powerpoint slides in a trench, and catch a train. That first lecture re-ignited his creative drive.

Soon after, he launched “Flight Club,” an informal initiative built on Telegram and Discord channels that brought together students, engineers, and soldiers for open talks on drones and defense innovation.

“There’s a confusion people often make—thinking the defense industry is the army,” he says. “But the defense industry is civil society in service of the soldiers.”

Flight Club is not about pushing enlistment, Adamov says. It shows how civilian skills—coding, engineering, design—are as essential as rifles. “And,” he adds, “mil-tech salaries are often triple what civilian engineers earn.”

Bringing Ukraine’s drone know-how to Europe

Since then, Vadym has been buried in responsibilities—military ones, of course, but also growing the Flight Club in Ukraine and Victory Drones abroad. As a frontline veteran and member of Victory Drones, he lectures in Europe and speaks to media outlets like Le Figaro or France24.

Asked if he ever takes a real day off, he answers: “I don’t know how to rest. Every ten minutes, a soldier dies. That’s a 9/11 every week. When I have leave, I can’t lie on a beach—I use it to do something useful.”

At 13, Adamov lost his father to a heart attack and soon enrolled in a first-aid course. He says maybe the war gave that urge to help a new dimension.

What interests me most in the army is eudaimonia —knowing that what you’re doing is good. Then it’s the sense of community. Life in tribes is the natural state of humans. That’s where the happiness in the army mainly comes from: being part of a tribe. Flight Club is how I try to recreate it in civilian life.

Vadym Adamov

Libertarian and philosophy amateur, Adamov loves France and the United States: “These two countries created modern politics as we know it today,” he says. But he warns their defense industries are not ready for the kind of war Ukraine is fighting against the Russian aggressor. In modern-day war, you need to be a cost-killer.

It’s a war of attrition, with low-cost equipment that can be mass-produced. The West still builds ultra-sophisticated gear—effective, but in very small numbers.

Vadym Adamov

He laughs when I mention Europe’s plan to build a “drone wall.”

“At first, I thought we Ukrainians were the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones. Now I realize we’re the Free Folk— anarchist “savages” stuck between the Wall and the demons of the North.”

Adamov is preparing to promote Victory Drones abroad and share Ukraine’s experience with its allies. But for one brief day, he told me, he allowed himself to get lost in the streets of Paris.

As the campus party winds up and I’m about to leave, Adamov, his student friend Bohdan, and I raise a toast. For a brief moment, he blends into student life. And I, for a brief moment, remember that Adamov is only 21.

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