A Hope and A Prayer

A Russian draftee stood alone and wounded in a trench. With only a shovel and water bottle in the dirt at his feet, Ruslin Anitin looked into the camera of the Ukrainian drone targeting him, clasped his hands in a silent plea—don’t kill me, I surrender.

Ruslin Anitin’s face was beamed onto a screen at a command post of Ukraine’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade a few miles away, near the eastern city of Bakhmut,” according to reporters for the Wall Street Journal.

“Col. Pavlo Fedosenko conferred with other officers, then sent an order over the radio to the drone pilots. Try to take him alive.” Drone footage shows what happened next: After receiving instructions in a dropped note, Anitin followed the drone through no man’s land—dodging Russian bombardment—to surrender into Ukrainian custody.

“Less than a week later, advancing Ukrainian forces captured the trench where Anitin’s ordeal began. By then, he was sharing a cell at a detention facility in the Kharkiv region with three other captured recruits.”