Russian Soldier Bashes Drone With Shovel After Detonation Failure: Video

A Russian soldier resorts to smashing a Ukrainian drone with a shovel after the aerial vehicle fails to explode near Russian positions, new footage appears to show.

In a clip shared online, including by open-source intelligence accounts, one of Moscow's soldiers can be seen dragging an explosive Ukrainian first-person-view (FPV) drone from where it has landed in a Russian trench before smacking the device with a shovel.

The video is said to have been taken at an unspecified location within Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, but it was not possible to verify when, nor where, the footage was filmed. Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

Kyiv has poured abundant resourcing into building up its "army of drones," a wide variety of uncrewed vehicles for missions including strikes on Russian positions and reconnaissance. Ukraine's drone tsar—Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov—has said that the country is on the path to becoming "a world leader in drones production."

Among this vast cache of drones are FPV kamikaze drones and reconnaissance vehicles. Ukraine goes through around 10,000 drones per month, British think tank the Royal United Services Institute, estimated earlier this year.

Drones "are the super weapon here," Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, told Newsweek in February. The sentiment has held true in the many months of warfare since.

Although Ukraine stormed ahead with drone production and use, analysts have suggested Russia is catching up and tipping resources into the uncrewed war in the air, on the ground and in the water.

On Wednesday, Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses destroyed three Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles over Crimea, which Moscow has controlled since 2014, but Ukraine has vowed to reclaim. Kyiv has increasingly targeted Crimea, using uncrewed vessels, missiles and completed a brief amphibious assault on the peninsula in August.

Four Ukrainian uncrewed surface vehicles were also destroyed in the western Black Sea en route to Crimea on Wednesday, the Russian government said in a statement.

In an operational update on Wednesday morning, the General Staff of Ukraine's armed forces said Russian forces had launched another wave of overnight drone strikes on Kyiv's territory, including with 14 Iranian-designed Shahed drones. Air defenses destroyed all of the drones, the military said.

In a separate video that has surfaced online, an unnamed soldier who appears to be a Russian marine deployed in the southern Kherson region tells the camera that "Ukrainians have three drones for each one of ours," citing another soldier.

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