Eddy Scott slammed the door shut as a drone buzzed overhead, and motioned to his mission partner: they had company in the sky.

Before them lay a road ridden with potholes, and the heavy evacuation van was barely moving at 15mph. After they crossed the railway tracks running through Pokrovsk, a front-line Ukrainian city under siege by Russians, a massive explosion rang out.

The impact knocked the van out of gear, and Mr Scott, a 28 year-old  from Dorset, tried to shift it back while turning the wheel. But the wheel wouldn’t budge, and he felt his shoulder twist. His arm went numb. “Ok, this is bad,” he recalls thinking.

“I told myself: ‘Don’t look at the arm, because if you look at it, you’re going to freak out.’ So I looked at my leg, and it was just shredded. I thought, oh f---.”

Then the pain hit.

Mr Scott’s van had been struck by a drone, despite it being marked as operated by UA Base, an NGO that evacuates Ukrainian civilians.

Such an attack constitutes a war crime, and is one of thousands Moscow’s armies have been accused of since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

As drone warfare has proliferated, so too have reports of Russian troops using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to attack civilian targets, be it infrastructure or civilians themselves.