An elite group of Ukrainian drone operators is hunting Russians from desert dugouts across Africa, as Kyiv wages a proxy war to bleed strongman Vladimir Putin’s global army and forge new alliances against Moscow.

Russia has deployed about 5,000 troops across Mali, Sudan and Libya to back coup-installed military dictatorships and warlords since 2020 — as Putin has tried tries to fill the void left by Western forces’ withdrawal and assert himself as a power player — often in exchange for lucrative mining rights.

And Ukraine has worked alongside local rebels to fight off those same Russian forces.

“I coordinate their operations remotely,” one of the Ukrainian drone operators in Mali told CNN of their efforts to help a local separatist group.

“The signal from their drone comes to me over the internet, and I immediately tell them via radio what to do and where to fly.”

Hunting Russians is something Ukrainian forces spent years perfecting in the motherland once Putin launched his invasion in 2022 — and the proxy war is part of Kyiv’s strategy to move the needle at home by collapsing its enemy elsewhere.

“It puts pressure on them. This whole story has both psychological and real results,” the drone operator said about Moscow.

Fifteen Ukrainian drone operators are embedded with the Azawad Liberation Front rebel group in Mali, fighting back more than 2,000 Russian troops in the desert propping up the military junta of Gen. Assimi Goïta, who seized power in back-to-back coups in 2020 and 2021 — and has since ruled without elections.

“They go out on missions, then return to me, and we go over every detail of their actions. I don’t go out to the front lines myself — that was a direct order from my superiors,” he said.

Ukraine has also trained troops from Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso, who traveled to Mali to learn from the Ukrainian soldiers there.

“Culture and religion are different, but when you are being attacked by the same idiots, ideological differences fade into the background,” a Ukrainian Defense Intelligence source told the outlet.

The campaign in Africa echoes Kyiv’s efforts in the Middle East where their drone expertise has been vital to US allies’ fighting against Tehran’s vaunted Shahed drones.

“We are turning our experience in the field of drones into a foreign policy tool,” said the defense intelligence source.

An increasingly desperate Kremlin is also using foreign recruits from a staggering 136 countries to fight its war in Ukraine, a new Amnesty International report published Thursday revealed.

“Recruitment has frequently involved deceptive, coercive and exploitative practices,” the organization said in its report, where it spoke with prisoners of war captured by Ukrainian forces.

The men have been from countries including Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Somalia and South Africa, often foreign nationals from low-income countries or migrants and refugees in Russia,

They were duped into joining Putin’s war by false promises of civilian jobs, high salaries, legal status or citizenship.

Meanwhile, the number of Russian soldiers killed on the battlefield has risen to 500,000 since the start of the war in Ukraine, according to new numbers from the British military intelligence published Friday.

Russian casualties, which also include wounded soldiers who can no longer fight, has reached 1.5 million men.