He was trapped on the front line for a month. Then a robot on wheels showed up

Kyiv
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The three hours Maksym spent being transported through the battlefield in eastern Ukraine felt like an eternity. Severely wounded and soaking wet, he was stuck inside a tiny, driverless armored capsule on wheels. He was exhausted, alone, and scared as hell.

But after numerous unsuccessful evacuation attempts and 33 days spent hiding in no man’s land with a tourniquet on his leg, he knew this was his best – and most likely his only – chance to survive.

Russian drones loaded with explosives and swarming for tens of kilometers around the front lines have made traditional medical evacuations all but impossible, so a ride inside a Ukrainian remote-controlled armored evacuation land drone – dubbed “Maulka” by the Ukrainians – is fast becoming the best way out.

“You can’t see anything and you’re going who knows where,” said Maksym, a soldier with the 22nd Mechanized Brigade who, like others quoted in this article, asked for his full name to be withheld for security reasons.

“I thought I wouldn’t make it. I thought that a (drone) would hit us, or we would blow up and get stuck somewhere, and I would stay there.”

His fears were not irrational – six unmanned vehicles that were previously sent for him were destroyed en route, including one that made it all the way to his position before being blown up by the Russians.

Medical evacuations of wounded soldiers have always involved huge amounts of risk, with rescue crews often forced to run, ride, drive, or fly right into the epicenter of the fighting.

But the rise of drones has made these missions much more lethal. The kill zone, the area around the front lines where troops are most exposed to attacks, has extended to dozens of miles as the drones’ range has grown.

The widely accepted international standard for medical evacuations has been the same for decades. Defined in NATO’s military doctrine as the “10-1-2 principle,” it says that a wounded soldier should be given first aid within 10 minutes of their injury, receive proper advanced medical care within one hour, and be in surgery within two hours.

This “golden hour” rule has been credited with saving many lives during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where NATO forces maintained air superiority.

But Hennadiy, a Ukrainian medic serving with the First Separate Medical Battalion, said these best practices are being brutally rewritten in Ukraine.

“Unfortunately, drones have changed the battlefield,” he said. “It is impossible to transport a wounded person by helicopter to a hospital within the golden hour. This was the case in all previous conflicts involving the United States (and) NATO countries, where they could afford it. Now, in our war, unfortunately, this is not possible,” he told CNN.

Evacuating casualties by air has never been a good option for Ukraine, as Russia has had control over much of the country’s airspace since the early days of the war. But Hennadiy said that at the beginning of the war, before Moscow began deploying aerial drones, it was still possible to evacuate casualties quickly in vehicles.

“This is becoming much less common because when picking up one wounded person, the evacuation crew can become casualties themselves, no matter how armored the vehicle is. The more armored the vehicle, the more it becomes a priority target (for the drones).”

Russia’s drone technology is now advancing so quickly that the reality on the ground is changing all the time, leaving the Ukrainian military scrambling for solutions.

Luckily for Maksym and others who have found themselves in seemingly impossible situations, some of Ukraine’s best brains are on the case.

Hundreds of rescued and counting

The Third Army Corps academy, nicknamed the KillHouse, is the beating heart of Ukraine’s cutting-edge drone industry. Part research and development center, part training facility, this is one of the places where teams of engineers, software developers and military personnel constantly refine Ukraine’s drone arsenal to fit the exact needs of different units.

The war in Ukraine is the first conflict in which drones – aerial, sea and land – are being deployed at scale, which means that the teams there must simply make it up as they go. Their work attracts a constant stream of foreign visitors, from high-level military delegations to groups of Western developers and engineers who are eager to see the latest Ukrainian technology for themselves.

On a recent afternoon at the facility, a training exercise was taking place inside a small room filled with the noise of tools and rambling motors. The students, soldiers as well as civilians, men and women, were running around assembling and launching different types of land drones, or Ground Robotic Complexes (GRCs), as they are technically called.

Fiddling with an antenna to establish a signal, one of the students told CNN he began as an infantryman in an airborne assault brigade but was retraining to become a land drone pilot. “Every unit wants a GRC battalion now. So they sent me here to study,” he said,

Most of the drones’ designs are simple: wheels and a platform with a cargo cage or an armored box on top. They need to withstand all kinds of terrains as well as possible attacks. Some are equipped with wheels, others come with tank-style track.

Maksym, the soldier extracted from no man’s land near Toretsk in eastern Ukraine in October, told CNN he heard explosions and smelled gunpowder while being taken to safety.

“It was as if someone had dropped explosives on me from a drone. I was told that it didn’t hit me, but somewhere nearby. I don’t know for sure,” he said. At one point, the evacuation drone hit a mine that damaged its front left wheel. “It was able to drive on three wheels, although it couldn’t turn left. But we made it.”

He was speaking to CNN from a hospital in Ukraine, where he is still recovering from his ordeal. He lost his leg, but the amputation wound is healing well and he is almost pain free.

Hundreds of these mighty machines are now being deployed at the front lines, saving lives by bringing essential supplies to forward positions and evacuating wounded soldiers to medical points.

“A drone is a consumable good, so you need a balance between price and quality,” one of the instructors, known as Stark for the Marvel Universe weapons manufacturer better known as Iron Man, told CNN. The prices of land drones range from $5,000 to more than $20,000 apiece.

“They are a priority target and are constantly hunted. But the advantage of a drone is that it is smaller than armored (vehicles), less noticeable, less noisy, and therefore easier to hide,” he added.

Stark told CNN that 90% of his brigade’s logistics tasks are now completed by land drones. And while Maksym was lucky to ride inside the armored capsule, many other injured Ukrainian soldiers have been evacuated simply lying on top of simple drones that are essentially remote-controlled carts, their bodies wrapped in bullet proof blankets.

“A GRC is a kind of an Uber on the battlefield. Unit commanders orders what they need to transport and what they need some help with, and GRC units carry out these tasks,” Stark said.

The drones used by his brigade alone had traveled some 70,000 kilometers over the past year, he said, and had evacuated hundreds of people.

One of the other instructors at the academy knows firsthand what being rescued by the machine feels like. The instructor who goes by the call sign Historian, a nod to his pre-war life studying to become a history teacher, told CNN he was probably one of the first people to be evacuated by drone.

Wearing military fatigues and a dusty pair of Adidas sneakers – one on his right foot and one on the prosthetic that replaced his left leg- Historian said he was injured by a Russian strike or an improvised explosive device.. His fellow soldiers gave him first aid and dragged him to a nearby dugout, then brought in one of the land drones to transport him to safety.

“There was a moment when, due to the bumpy road and the lack of a suspension on the vehicle, my injured left foot fell off and started dragging on the ground, but my brother-in-arms immediately noticed this and picked it up,” he said.

While the ride was “a little uncomfortable”, it was a much better option that waiting to be evacuated in an armoured vehicle, which would take a lot longer to get to the location.

The journey took about an hour and a half and, apart from the moments when drones and shells were flying around, went smoothly.

“There are moments when you want to escape from the vehicle, but you kind of can’t,” Historian said, pointing at his missing leg and laughing. A joke only a hardened Ukrainian soldier would find funny.