Jose Colon/Anadolu via Getty Images
Ukraine’s military released footage on Thursday of a rare instance where a first-person-view drone captured a man identified as a Russian soldier and brought him alone to Ukrainian lines.
The incident was recorded on Tuesday, said the Magyar Birds, a famed drone unit that filmed the clips.
The footage shows a man clad in military attire raising his hands in surrender to a small quadcopter drone.
It later cuts to an observer Mavic drone’s view of the man stumbling through a forest as he follows the FPV quadcopter through several rows of concertina wire. He eventually meets a second man, who can be seen taking over the escorting of the prisoner.
“The pilot did not eliminate the invader, but escorted him to our positions and handed him over to the infantry of the adjacent unit,” Ukraine’s ground forces wrote on its official Facebook page in the Thursday post.
The Magyar Birds said on its social media channels on Wednesday that the exchange happened in the Donbas region.
It added that the pilot in the clips, a crew commander with the call sign “Payne,” used an “F10” drone. The F10 likely refers to a reusable, lightweight FPV drone created in late 2023 by Robert Magyar, the businessman who founded the Magyar Birds.
The unit said it was the first time its pilots had captured a soldier with an FPV drone.
Similar cases have been reported before, but few known instances have involved a soldier being taken captive almost purely by a quadcopter and then escorted until he reaches enemy lines.
In September, for example, an FPV drone pilot from Ukraine’s 54th Mechanized Brigade was recorded dropping a soldier a note and drinking water, leading the latter to surrender and follow the drone to a trench. Ukrainian soldiers later arrived and apprehended the man.
And in February, the 25th Separate Airborne Brigade released a video of what it said was an FPV drone using a loudspeaker to persuade nine Russian soldiers to surrender.
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