Perched in a pear tree, a 12-year-old Ukrainian boy found himself taking on one of Russia's stealthiest weapons. When Anatolii Prokhorenko heard the familiar whine of a drone in his village near the Russian border, he watched a black quadcopter skim past him and climb toward the yard where his younger siblings were playing. According to the Washington Post, the drone was a fiber-optic-guided, first-person view (FPV) model—one of many small, explosive-laden drones used to track and kill civilians far from the front. These drones are tethered to operators by a hair-thin cable that carries video and commands, making them immune to radio jamming.
Anatolii had seen the ghostly strands of fiber-optic cable hanging across roads and trees for months and, by chance, had once asked a soldier how they worked. The soldier showed him how the nearly unbreakable line could be snapped with special loops and pinches—and told him to wait 15 seconds after a drone passed so the operator wouldn't see him. When Anatolii spotted the cable trailing the drone that was heading for his family home, he dropped from the tree, grabbed the filament, looped it, counted to 10 instead of 15 because "I didn't have time," then yanked, he tells the Post. The line broke, and the drone suddenly veered off and crashed in a swampy area without detonating.
The boy has since been hailed as a hero in Ukraine—and vilified in Russian online channels, prompting his family to temporarily relocate to the regional capital of Chernihiv. Their village, seven miles from the border, still sees the glint of new fiber-optic lines and fresh strikes; a neighbor was injured when a drone hit her car last week. Then on Thursday, FPV drones hit a convoy of UN-marked vehicles and a humanitarian aid center with UN vehicles parked outside, reports France 24. UN investigators have described Russia's campaign to target civilians—which Ukrainians grimly refer to as a "human safari"—as "a crime against humanity."
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