Russian Soldiers Are Surrendering To Ukrainian Drones. This Has Happened Before.

Firing missiles, dropping tiny bombs and spotting targets for artillery, the Ukrainian army’s drones undoubtedly are responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of Russian casualties as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its tenth month.

Ukrainian drones also are capturing live Russians.

In the latest example of a flesh-and-blood soldier surrendering to a plastic-and-metal robot, a Russian soldier apparently somewhere in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region dropped his weapon and raised his hands when a quadcopter-style drone belonging to the Ukrainian army’s 54th Mechanized Brigade appeared overhead.

Hands in the air, the Russian soldier followed the drone toward Ukrainian lines. “Drones are the fiercest enemies of the occupiers,” the Ukrainian defense ministry crowed on social media. “But it turns out, not of all of them. This one took into captivity an occupier that realized that surrender is a chance to survive.”

People surrendering to drones—it’s happened before. Many times, in fact.

The first radio-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles flew way back in 1917. By the 1960s, UAVs were in widespread military use. U.S. Air Force Lightning Bug jet-powered drones flew thousands of long-range reconnaissance missions during the Vietnam War.

Satellite communications, GPS and streaming video made drones a lot more useful starting in the late 1980s. The U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps flew propeller-driven Pioneer drones as part of the air campaign over Kuwait and Iraq in 1991. That apparently is when UAVs captured their first-ever prisoners of war.

Navy Pioneers, catapulting from the deck of the battleship USS Missouri, spotted targets for Missouri’s 16-inch guns. While one Pioneer was assessing damage from naval bombardment targeting Iraqi positions on Faylaka Island near Kuwait City, several Iraqi soldiers “signaled their intention to surrender to the aircraft during a low pass,” the National Air and Space Museum noted. Coalition ground troops landed on the island and took the Iraqis into captivity.

It was “the first time enemy soldiers had ever surrendered to an unmanned aerial vehicle,” the museum explained. It wasn’t the last. Separately in 1991, a group of around 40 Iraqis surrendered to a different Pioneer.

Flash forward 31 years. The Ukrainian and Russian armed forces have deployed thousands of drones. Small, off-the-shelf models costing a few thousand dollars as well as big, Predator-style models costing millions. Both sides have used their drones to entice enemy troops to surrender.

“UAV operators … send SMS messages with calls for laying down arms to the subscribers of mobile operators the nationalists are known to be using,” the Russian defense ministry told state media.

There’s no evidence Russia’s “text-to-surrender” drones have been successful. Ukraine’s own POW-catching drones, by contrast, have enjoyed some success.

Ukrainian forces in Kherson Oblast in southern Ukraine reportedly fitted a drone with a loudspeaker and broadcast an appeal to surrender, apparently during the Ukrainian counteroffensive that kicked off in the oblast in late August.

Three Russians threw down their weapons and threw up their hands. “This shows how drones can be used not only to save Ukrainian lives but also to capture Russian soldiers,” a Ukrainian drone operator told Ukrainian World Congress.

Ten weeks later, that solitary Russian followed a Ukrainian quadcopter into captivity. Given the increasing rate at which starving Russian draftees are giving up and turning themselves in to the Ukrainians, it wouldn’t be shocking if drones in coming weeks and months round up a lot more POWs.