You also can't kill surrendered enemies, but that's not what the situation was here. Though for drones (and airpower in general, or even things like artillery) surrendering is obviously more-problematic than it was in an era when infantry did a larger chunk of the killing.

I do recall reading about one point where a Russian soldier did surrender to a Ukrainian drone, and they led him to captivity with the drone, but obviously that's an unusual case; both the drone operator and the surrendering soldier have to go out of their way to make that work.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/15/europe/russian-soldier-surrenders-drone-bakhmut-ukraine-intl-hnk/index.html

There are no accepted conventions today to facilitate that sort of thing, and the technology isn't terribly well-suited to it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

Surrender to drone may never become common. Accepting a surrender incurs substantial risk, and the relief of not needing to kill someone in person is probably psychologically important to the decision to accept that risk. I am sure that remote kills/captures operate under different moral calculus.