On a scorched brown field pitted by blast craters, a lone Russian soldier cowers under the charred remains of his tank, sheltering from a terrifying new threat – one that already has him in its sights.

From the sky above comes the whining buzz that has become the nightmare of Putin's forces on the front line in Ukraine – that of a tiny suicide drone, no larger than a football but packed with enough explosives to level a house.

The noise sends the helpless soldier into a frenzied panic, as he desperately scrambles round his tank trying to escape, while the kamikaze death machine chases him in a deadly game of cat and mouse – one the Russian loses.

The aerial attacker hits Kremlin fighter with ruthless efficiency, detonating in a flash of orange flame and white smoke, leaving his bloodied body a lifeless wreck, smouldering on the muddy floor.

The brutal encounter - now common place at the front - was filmed by another UAV, with the kamikaze controlled from a bunker miles away by a Ukrainian soldier wearing special goggles that give him a first-person view (FPV) of the carnage. 

It's the ugly new dawn in the savage attritional plod of Ukraine's war, which sees FPV drones swarming the battlefield, pulverising troops on both sides, in a tactic that was almost unheard of a year ago. Now, hundreds of suicide drone missions are flown along the front every day.

The latest killing was carried out by Ukrainians from the 'Wild Division' of the 2nd Air Assault Brigade, which has become so lethal operators can fly FPVs into bunkers, through windows and can even hit lone Russians, who they disparagingly call 'Orcs'.

Grisly footage on social media shows the suicide bots slamming into packed troop transports, blowing them – and the soldiers within – to smithereens, flinging limbs across the battlefield. Others see drones dealing death from above, ambushing troops as they evacuate injured comrades on stretchers.