The Russian drone screamed as it chased down the Ukrainian vehicle at high speed, going for a direct strike. One of the soldiers in the back opened fire with a machine gun, but couldn’t knock it down.
“It starts to maneuver to hit us,” said Khyzhak, one of the Ukrainian special operators who was riding shotgun in the vehicle.
“And my dude in the backseat, he started the shooting — firing — at the drone,” he said. Drones, though, are notoriously hard to hit. The operator couldn’t get a clean shot.
“But our driver — he drove like a god,” Khyzhak said.
In his first interview since the harrowing incident, Khyzhak — for security reasons identified only by his call sign, “Predator” in Ukrainian — told Business Insider that the Russian drone armed with an explosive closed to within just a few feet during the chase.
He captured the entire incident on his helmet camera. The drone narrowly missed and detonated by the roadside.
Checking to see if they had been hit, the Ukrainian soldiers scrambled to get out of the vehicle. After realizing they had actually survived the attack, a shock in this war where so many haven’t, they quickly got back in and sped off, fearing that another Russian drone might be on its way to their location.
The dangerous incident occurred in September in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region, but the 4th Ranger Regiment, a Ukrainian special operations unit modeled after its US Army counterparts, only published the footage captured from Khyzhak’s camera in mid-November.
The 4th @SOF_UKR Regiment Rangers skillfully maneuver away from an enemy FPV while returning from the frontline to the base. Video from the ranger’s action camera of the 2nd Battalion, the Northern-Slobozhanskyi direction.
Ukrainian SOF: Always Beyond! pic.twitter.com/i7tN5PQsSZ— 4th Ranger Regiment SOF Ukraine (@Rangers_uasof) November 14, 2025
The footage offers a front-row seat to the style of drone warfare that has been playing out on the battlefield in Ukraine for years. First-person-view (FPV) drones that carry explosive warheads, like the one in this video, are a common way for both sides to deliver cheap and deadly precision strikes on vehicles and personnel.
At the time of the incident, Khyzhak, a small-unit commander in the 4th Ranger Regiment, was traveling back to base with two other operators and their driver after completing a front-line mission.
The Ukrainians were in a buggy, a four-wheel vehicle with no external protection but excellent maneuverability and speed, when the Russian FPV drone suddenly appeared from behind.
The hostile drone was a fiber-optic FPV, meaning that it could not be jammed and disabled with electronic warfare. The best chance soldiers have to defeat these weapons is to shoot them, but even then, it requires precision and a lot of luck. It’s a hard shot even when soldiers aren’t fighting from the back of a moving vehicle.
Khyzhak said he experienced an “instant adrenaline explosion” and that there was no time to think; all he knew was that they needed to shoot it down.
“I’m looking at the drone, [and the] drone’s looking at me. I know it wants to kill me, or just hit me, so I need to do something with that,” he recalled. But options were limited. “You can try to shoot it down, and you can try to maneuver, just what our driver did.”
The buggy driver saw the drone coming from behind and realized it was moving into position to strike the front of the vehicle. He pumped the brakes a few seconds before the anticipated impact, and it exploded a few feet away.
In the scramble to exit their vehicle, one of the operators broke his leg while jumping out. In the moment, though, they were focused on surviving and then getting out of there before another drone came to kill them. It’s not uncommon for more to follow.
Khyzhak said that he “absolutely” credits the buggy driver with saving the crew’s lives. In such an exposed vehicle, a direct hit would have almost certainly caused serious damage, as well as injuries or worse, among the operators.
“Our drivers in our battalion — our squad — I think they’re big, big professionals, and we are lucky to have them on our side,” Khyzhak said. “I trust them absolutely and completely.”
Russian and Ukrainian forces continue to use small drones with explosives to deliver strikes on enemy positions, equipment, weaponry, military vehicles, and personnel as uncrewed systems increasingly dominate the conflict.
Drones are estimated to be responsible for destroying around 90% of targets on the battlefield, Lt. Col. Yurii Myronenko, Ukraine’s deputy minister of defense for innovation and a former drone unit commander, recently told Business Insider.
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