Upon arriving at a Ukrainian position, the soldier reportedly dropped to his knees and removed his helmet and flak jacket.

Ukrainian forces took him into their custody, loaded him into a Humvee truck, and he was later brought to a detention facility in the Kharkiv region, the paper reported.

“This is probably an unprecedented case when, through the coordinated work of the brigade and the aerial reconnaissance component, we managed to capture the occupier,” Ukrainian commander Fedorenko said.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Russian soldier and former prison marshal was working as a liquor-store manager before he was drafted in September last year.

Before being sent to Bakhmut, he said he had performed guard duties and built fortified positions in Luhansk.

The eastern city of Bakhmut, toward the northeast of the Donetsk region, has seen some of the fiercest fighting of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and is a key part of Kyiv’s counteroffensive.

The months-long battle has been compared to the kind of fighting seen in World War I, with soldiers fighting in muddy trenches dodging artillery fire, and has been described by the head of the Russian Wagner mercenary group as a “meat grinder.”

Cheap commercial drones have become a crucial tool in the Ukraine war, both as surveillance platforms and offensive weapons.

Ukrainian soldiers have become deft at jerry-rigging off the shelf drones to drop explosives on enemy troops and vehicles.

Drones have also saved lives.

Earlier this year, a CNN team in Ukraine reported how in the opening stages of Moscow’s invasion a group of Ukrainian soldiers used a drone to help lead a civilian woman to safety after the car she was traveling in was fired upon by the Russians.

Footage of that attack, which critically wounded the woman’s husband, was also captured on the same drone’s camera and, along with intercepted phone calls, has been used by Ukrainian prosecutors to build an in absentia war crimes probe against a Russian commander.