Three wounded Ukrainian soldiers waited more than a month near the front lines. No armored vehicle could reach them—drones would strike anything that moved. So Ukraine sent robots instead.
That rescue captures how battlefield medicine is changing in Ukraine, where the "golden hour" for saving wounded soldiers has vanished under constant drone surveillance. Medics can't reach casualties, armored vehicles get destroyed, and soldiers die from wounds that would have been survivable in any previous war.
The shift to robotic evacuation marks a fundamental change in battlefield medicine—one that could determine whether Ukraine can sustain its defense as the war grinds on.
With Russia willing to expend seemingly endless numbers of people and Ukraine needing to preserve every soldier, these robots aren't just saving individual lives. They're helping Ukraine fight asymmetrically against a much larger force.
The ground drones are only one prong of this uncrewed army. Drones are now playing a central role across every domain of combat. The skies are now filled with aerial drones, and their kill zone continues to expand in all directions. Drones have revolutionized warfare on land and at sea as well.
Any future conflict is likely to be drone-dominated—and that means that ground robots will need to save the lives of soldiers under a sky saturated with drones not only in Ukraine.
Why Ukraine lost the golden hour
Colonel Kostiantyn Humeniuk, the chief surgeon of the Medical Forces of Ukraine, said, "As of today, the war has fundamentally changed because our enemy uses modern unmanned aerial vehicles." He added, "On the battlefield, armored vehicles are almost absent."
"So we are faced with a modern war where drones are the main type of weapon. Today, in the theatre of war, almost all the injuries we see among our service members are drone-related injuries."
According to Humeniuk, the biggest challenge is that they've lost the golden hour—the period in which medical attention has a higher chance of saving someone suffering traumatic injury. The army can no longer evacuate wounded from combat zones quickly.
"That's the most serious problem. Evacuating a wounded soldier from the battlefield using any kind of armored vehicle, medical or otherwise, is practically impossible," Humeniuk said. "Drones have shown that they are low-visibility. They don't make much noise and are almost unnoticeable on the battlefield."
Douglas Davis, an Assistant Professor of Radiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a frequent medical volunteer in Ukraine, commented on how battlefield injuries are changing,
"Tourniquet Syndrome from delayed evacuation was the main reason many lost limbs. This is very different than what we saw in the first 2 years."
How ground robots solved the unsolvable problem
"Ukraine is one of the first countries to implement drones for medical evacuation, on land, by air, and even by water. They're low-visibility and almost silent," Humeniuk added. "They can carry the wounded one to three kilometers from the front."
Current medical training is often outdated, like the application of tourniquets, said Rima, a medic in Ukraine's International Legion.
"It doesn't prepare you for the kind of catastrophic injuries we're seeing from drone-dropped munitions. Close-quarters combat is rare now; it's almost all shrapnel and blast trauma," she said.
"Medics out here are forced to learn on the fly because we have no other choice. And nine times out of 10, it's not just one or two wounded, it's a full-blown mass casualty situation."
Volodymyr Rovenskyi, an officer in the ground force's Department for the Development of Ground Control Systems for Unmanned Systems, said in a briefing that 47% of Ukrainian UGV missions involved delivering supplies or evacuating soldiers.
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The work is still far from safe. Units avoid operating UGVs during daylight hours, as movement of the machines is easy to spot and they are highly vulnerable to strikes from first-person view drones (FPVs).
Third Assault Brigade soldier Kostas, known as El Greco, said FPVs were "the number-one threat to UGVs."
UGVs' primary roles were "logistics and evacuation, followed by engineering tasks, and finally kamikaze strikes or fire support," he said.
Lyuba Shipovich, chief executive of Dignitas—a non-profit that supports the military—and head of the Victory Robots project for deploying UGVs, said "returning both the wounded and the dead" was now one of the main functions of ground robots.
The connectivity challenge keeping robots offline
But it's not as simple as it seems. Connectivity remains one of the biggest challenges. Soldiers cannot risk being evacuated on a ground robot that loses its radio-control signal or satellite navigation or suffers a technical failure, leaving it stranded and the casualty exposed to drone strikes.
To counter this, frontline units are experimenting with multiple, parallel channels for connectivity—such as wi‑fi mesh networks, Starlink satellite links, and LTE terrestrial networks—to keep the robots online.
Analogue radio systems make ground robots highly susceptible to enemy jamming, so most units are trying to move to multi‑node networks with data relaying combined with satellite control links. This greatly improves resilience. However, these upgrades significantly raise costs, which are already a barrier to widespread adoption.
"In practice, solutions that simply attach fiber optics to UGVs may prove more effective and solve the immediate challenges," said Vitaliy Honcharuk, CEO of A19Lab and former Chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Committee of Ukraine.
But the effectiveness of these missions also improves when combined with other efforts to distract the enemy. "During evacuation missions, especially when we're evacuating wounded soldiers, we need distraction maneuvers, artillery support, and drones to ensure the soldier is evacuated as safely as possible," said Shipovich.
"In our last 60 missions, we lost two UGVs, one due to operator error, one to an FPV drone," said Yehven, callsign "Kharkiv," a UGV company commander in the 92nd Assault Brigade. One member of the unit, a former software engineer in his late twenties, has built custom software to enhance the UGVs' functionality.
This is part of a trend in which engineers in workshops across the front are tinkering and testing to improve their UGVs.
What Ukraine's frontline medicine means for future wars
These ground robots are only beginning to transform frontline medicine, carrying out more and more evacuations. They are also taking on an increasing share of logistical work. In time, Ukraine's frontline commanders expect to deploy many more robots across the front, continuing to wage asymmetrical warfare against Russia.
Ukrainian electronic warfare expert Serhii ("Flash") Beskrestnov believes that, in the future, infantry will stay underground, with only robots operating on the surface and taking the greatest risks.
Even if Western military planners believe they can establish air dominance in future conflicts, Ukraine shows how modern battlefields can still turn into battles of grinding attrition. Preparing for that possibility is no less essential than working to prevent it.
The innovations Ukrainian units are developing—from fiber-optic control to multi-node networks—represent the emerging playbook for warfare in contested environments where drones dominate the skies.
