15-kilometer flight into kill zone: Ukraine’s drone rescues wounded soldier by air

Stranded and wounded for 57 days, a Ukrainian soldier was finally flown out by drone. Andrii, callsign Donbas, 54, had lost a foot and could not be reached by the usual means at a position about two kilometers from the Russian border until fighters of the CODE 9.2 unit used the StarGate aerial evacuation system to lift him out, RBC-Ukraine reports.

Getting the wounded off the battlefield has become one of the deadliest tasks of the war. Aerial drones like StarGate can reach positions that ground vehicles and crawling robots cannot, opening a way out where soldiers were once left to wait.

A 15-kilometer flight to a position no one could reach

To reach Andrii, the StarGate drone flew about 15 kilometers to his position and carried him out of the exposed area; he is now in a hospital receiving treatment.

StarGate, a purpose-built aerial medical-evacuation drone from the Ukrainian company SkyFall, has been in front-line testing only since mid-October, and this was its third evacuation.

Unlike the ground robots Ukraine usually relies on, which mud, mines, or a single Russian strike can stop, it flies over the terrain that traps them.

Ukraine is racing to carry its wounded out, and still losing some

The flight is one answer to a problem of evacuation for Kyiv. Over the past year it has shifted much of its casualty evacuation onto unmanned ground vehicles, known as NRKs, which have run more than 100,000 supply and evacuation missions this year and carry the wounded in armored capsules.

But the robots are slow and easy to hit: in one case, the 1st Separate Medical Battalion needed seven attempts and lost six robots over 33 days to bring out a single soldier kept alive by a tourniquet.

Crewed armor is no safer: Tetiana Chornovol, a platoon commander, has described how, during one rescue, her combat vehicle, fitted with electronic warfare and an anti-mine grader, blew up on an anti-tank mine dropped by a drone, and a second vehicle lost its driver’s legs to another.

Most units still lack dedicated evacuation teams, and the shortage of medical-evacuation vehicles has been put as high as 80%. A drone that simply flies over the mines is built for the positions none of that can reach.