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Surrender to a Drone? Ukraine Is Urging Russian Soldiers to Do Just That.

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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Tens of thousands of drones have been employed across Ukraine to kill the enemy, spy on its formations and guide bombs to their targets. But this month the Ukrainian military began a program to use drones in a more unusual role: to guide Russian soldiers who want to surrender.
The program had its genesis in late November, when the Ukrainian military released footage of a Russian soldier throwing his weapon to the ground, raising his hands and nervously following a path set out by a drone overhead, leading him to soldiers from the Ukrainian army’s 54th Mechanized Brigade.
A few weeks later, the Ukrainian General Staff released an instructional video explaining how Russian soldiers can surrender to a Ukrainian drone, and it is now part of a wide-ranging effort by Ukraine to persuade Russian soldiers to give up. The program, called “I want to live,” includes a phone hotline, a website and a Telegram channel all dedicated to communicating to Russian soldiers and their families.
It’s too early to know whether the drone effort will lure Russian deserters in any meaningful numbers. But it adds another avenue for Ukraine to recruit Russian deserters, this one with a distinctly modern twist to the age-old tactic of informational warfare. And if nothing else, it may further the erosion of Russian morale on the battlefield.
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Russian defeats have already provided an opening for Ukraine to exploit that low morale, especially in the months after the Kremlin’s September mobilization, which has sent thousands of new recruits into fierce battles with little training and scant supplies.
Petro Yatsenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for Treatment of Prisoners of War, said in an interview Monday that Ukraine has had more than 4,300 direct requests for information on how to surrender through the “I want to live” program. It is not possible to independently verify the claims.
Mr. Yatsenko said the military would not release information about the number of Russians in Ukrainian captivity for security reasons.



Andriy Yusov, who represents the intelligence department in Ukraine’s ministry of defense, said Ukraine had received 1.2 million inquiries about the program since it was set up on Sept. 18. Most of the queries are coming from Russia, he said, and the vast majority involved appeals from “people who are studying for themselves or their relatives the possibility of saving life in the bloody and unjust war.”
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For the past ten months, both Russia and Ukraine have engaged in robust informational campaigns targeting enemy soldiers with leaflets, social media posts, radio appeals, text messages and television campaigns, all dedicated to convincing them to surrender.

In May, when the Russians were laying waste to towns and cities and beginning to gobble up land in eastern Ukraine, not all the guns were loaded with explosives. Some Soviet-era self-propelled howitzers had shells set up to explode in the air and scatter leaflets over Ukrainian-controlled territory, according to Zvezda, a Russian state-owned nationwide TV network run by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
“We give the last warning to the Ukrainian Nazis to surrender,” an artilleryman named Vadim told the station.
More recently, the Russians announced that its drone operators were sending SMS messages to Ukrainian mobile phone subscribers telling them to lay down their arms. There’s no evidence Russia’s “text-to-surrender” drones have had any impact.

 
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