Driving deep into the forest, the hush between the towering pine trees and the clear blue skies was splintered every few seconds by the sound of distant explosions from the frontline battles for eastern Ukraine.
Guiding us through the woodland on foot, Ukrainian soldiers eventually brought us to a clearing where they showed us the wreckage of a weaponized drone which they said they shot down with their AK-47 automatic weapons over the weekend.
The drone was a Mugin-5, a commercial unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) made by a Chinese manufacturer based in the port city of Xiamen, on China’s eastern coast.
Some tech bloggers say the machines are known as “Alibaba drones” as they have been available for sale for up to $15,000 on Chinese marketplace websites including Alibaba and Taobao.
Mugin Limited confirmed to CNN that it was their airframe, calling the incident “deeply unfortunate.”
It’s the latest example of a civilian drone being retrofitted and weaponized since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a sign of the rapidly shifting patterns of warfare.
“Along the frontlines, basically all the time we’re conducting aerial reconnaissance,” said Maksim, a 35-year-old territorial defense fighter who wanted to go only by his first name.
Low altitude
Overnight Friday into Saturday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) told CNN that their agents based in Russian-held territory alerted them that a UAV had been launched from there, heading towards a Ukrainian target.
The SBU then raised the alarm with military units based in eastern Ukraine, near the city of Sloviansk.
At around 2 a.m. Saturday, fighters from the 111th Brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine heard the drone overhead, and even saw a light blinking on the aircraft.
“From the sound, from the signal light, the troops fired a lot at it and knocked down the UAV,” Maksim said.
Maksim said the UAV was flying at very low altitude – close enough to bring it down with hand-held weapons.
Now lying on the forest floor, a bullet hole was visible on the nose of the machine, which had broken apart and sustained significant damage.
Nearby, the soldiers also showed us a small crater in the earth which was created by the payload on the UAV – a bomb of approximately 44 pounds (20 kilograms), which was later safely detonated by the fighters.
In a video shared with CNN, the Ukrainian fighters showed how they hooked up a US-made demolition charge and then sprinted through the forest to their truck, before driving away at speed.
At a distance of around 1,640 feet (500 meters), they then stopped their vehicle and turned to film the powerful impact of the blast – a reminder of the potential damage it could have caused had it met its intended target on Ukrainian soil.
CNN reached out to Russia’s Ministry of Defense for comment on the incident, but has not yet received a response.
‘Crude, unsophisticated’
The weaponized commercial drone did not have a camera fitted, which means it could not have been used for surveillance, and essentially makes it similar to a “dumb bomb,” according to Chris Lincoln-Jones, a retired British Army officer and specialist in drone warfare.
“This particular drone that we’ve been looking at would be much more effective if it had a decent camera in it,” Lincoln-Jones said.
He added that the machine adds more evidence to the theory that Russia is not the military superpower that the world might have expected.
“This seems to be a very crude, unsophisticated, not very technologically advanced way of conducting operations,” he said, adding that the price of the machines is very cheap in military terms.