Russia’s destroyed vehicles are being melted into buggies that save Ukrainian lives under drone fire

Ukraine is pulling its wounded out of the front line in buggies built partly from destroyed Russian tanks. A new modification of the "Predator" evacuation buggy has reached the 17th and 20th Army Corps, Ukrainian military and political analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko of the Information Resistance group reported.

The two corps received 10 experimental "Predator" evacuation buggies, delivered with the help of the international charitable foundation Nova Ukraine, a US-based Ukrainian diaspora organization founded in 2014.

The vehicles are meant to evacuate wounded quickly from hard-to-reach areas, one of the deadliest problems on a front where Russian FPV drones hunt anything that moves. Casualty evacuation has become so dangerous that wounded soldiers can wait months for extraction, and Ukraine has turned to ground robots, multicopter drones, and purpose-built vehicles to pull people out without exposing rescuers.

The Predator buggy is the cheap, fast, human-driven end of that effort.

The buggies are made partly from salvaged Russian equipment

The detail Kovalenko flagged as symbolic is what the buggies are built from. A number of the buggy's components are machined at the manufacturer's own lathes from materials taken from captured Russian equipment beyond repair, in particular the aluminum alloy ABT-102, he said.

Russia's destroyed vehicles are being turned into the machines that save Ukrainian lives.

A volunteer project that outruns Western serial production

The Predator is what Kovalenko calls a "people's buggy," and its origin is the story. The buggies began reaching Ukraine's Defense Forces in 2022 as a volunteer initiative by enthusiasts from Vinnytsia and became among the most sought-after vehicles in the near-front-line zone.

Kovalenko drew a careful distinction to head off misreading. This is not an assault vehicle, he stressed, but a machine for logistics, evacuation, and raiding or sabotage operations.

Over time, the buggies have been heavily upgraded: production shifted to exclusively all-wheel-drive versions, the frame and components were reinforced, and an all-wheel-drive buggy now weighs a little over a ton.

The performance he describes is serious. The buggy reaches over 120 km/h on rough terrain, climbs steep slopes, and can mount a turret with a 360-degree traverse and almost no blind spots, which Kovalenko called a good option for mobile fire groups. Its cross-country ability, he said, is better than that of many pickups, allowing it to work in the hardest terrain rather than only on roads and hard ground.

The economics are the point he closes on. The Predator's production remains possible thanks to volunteer support and regular fundraisers for units in acute need of such vehicles. In Ukraine, the buggy has practically no competitors on price and quality, Kovalenko said, calling it a project that even Western serial-production analogs struggle to match.