Aleksandr heard the whine of an approaching Russian drone. A Ukrainian infantryman on a four-soldier foot patrol, he was picking his way at 2 a.m. through the waist-high vegetation of an August meadow. A high-pitched whir rose in the moonless quiet. An armed multicopter had detected them and was maneuvering to attack.
Now luck would influence fates. The soldiers were on a mission to string wire across the forlorn emptiness between opposing trench lines, creating obstacles to entangle Russian infantry and strip invaders on motocross bikes from their seats. Weighed down by equipment, they were caught in the open and exposed. The nearest hint of protection — the woodlot they stepped out from minutes before — was about 300 yards back.
Both Russia and Ukraine operate remotely piloted mini-aircraft that watch over the battlefield with cameras and pursue targets on sight. Some drop bomblets. Others sweep low with explosive charges to strike quarry kamikaze-style. All fly more than twice the speed that even a fit soldier can sprint, a disparity ensuring that many engagements end in one-sided agonies and video-recorded gore. In this new form of warfare, chance still plays a role. When multiple soldiers appear together, most drones cannot strike them all. A pilot must decide: This man? That one? The fleeing soldier who tripped, becoming an easy kill? Or the pair running together who might be felled two at once?
The pilot chose Aleksandr, a silhouette holding a rifle in tall grass.
The drone stopped above him and released a small explosive munition. After a brief free fall, it landed beside him on dirt.
Light flashed in Aleksandr’s eyes, accompanied by a blast that threw him down. His luck was bad: Shrapnel tore through him; pain flared in his left leg. His luck was good: The drone did not linger for the finish. It darted away, chasing his peers as they bounded for trees. Bleeding, pressed to soil, he heard more explosions, off in the direction from where he had come.
Quiet settled over the field.
Aleksandr sat up. The Russian pilot, he thought, had mistaken him for dead. Or perhaps the drone, an improvised weapon based on a consumer gadget, was out of ammunition or needed a battery change. Whatever the reason, it no longer hunted here. Aleksandr was left wounded in the void of no man’s land, a zone surveilled by drones and roamed by animals scavenging the fallen. The darkness was almost total. Blood pulsed out from his lower leg, soaking his sock and boot. He pulled a tourniquet from his first-aid kit, slipped it around his calf and cinched it tight, then assessed his injuries by sliding his hands down the limb, feeling where shrapnel had blown through his shin. Without light, he could not see the wound but sensed it was bad. Bones were shattered and he could not move his foot, which he assumed hung by loose flesh and skin.
He tried to stand. His right leg was strong but his left bore no weight. He eased himself down, swore and shouted for help. “Guys!” he screamed. “Guys! I’m alive!” No one replied. In pain, alone, all but immobilized, Aleksandr was stranded where no ambulance would come.
His mission had been timed for a dark period between moonset and sunrise. The sky was black, silent and vast. But in less than three hours, daybreak would illuminate the meadow where he bled. Many more Russian drones would take flight. Aleksandr’s future distilled to a simple binary. If he could reach the woodlot by dawn, he might be pulled to safety and surgical care. If not, he’d almost certainly end up like countless other soldiers in this war: laying helpless on farmland until a predatory drone descended and an explosion tore him apart, his last wretched seconds recorded for social media’s 24-7 snuff-film deathstream.
Time was tight. Aleksandr removed his helmet and body armor and pushed them away. Protective equipment may have saved his life; now it would slow him down. He set aside his rifle and ammunition too, then dug through his backpack, evaluating what to keep. He settled on a gray poncho, a flashlight, a spare tourniquet, a pack of cigarettes and his phone. He considered his wooden-handled hunting knife and kept it as well. If his left foot snagged and held him up, he told himself, he would cut it off.
The trees seemed far away, a distant dark wall. He intended to reach it. With his right leg to push and his left to drag, Aleksandr began to crawl.
Of war’s many terrors, being stranded between lines ranks among the worst. No man’s lands lie within range of multiple and overlapping weapons used by both sides, and tend to be under near-constant surveillance. Moving across one can attract almost any kind of fire. Moreover, because soldiers manning trenches live in conditions of extraordinary stress and often are jittery, confusion can lead to troops opening fire on their own. Approaching your side’s defenses can end as badly as charging toward dug-in foes.
To this bleak predicament, the war in Ukraine has added a vicious new normal — the ubiquity of small aerial attack drones, startlingly effective tools for finding and killing those caught between. Staying pressed to dirt, bounding from shell crater to shell crater, weaving a path through stream beds or other natural lanes of low ground — none of these time-tested measures offer reliable cover anymore. Acrobatic multicopters, with lidless electronic eyes and fragmenting explosive payloads, can detect the most careful soldiers, then run them down. Multicopters also lace deserted spaces with airdropped land mines, compounding the horrors.
Innumerable videos attest to the long odds and gruesome endings of those in Aleksandr’s circumstance. Their brutal deaths are the daily fare of the Telegram messaging app, a medium flooded with war-related content. An uglier fact lurks within the bloody displays: The new dangers extend far past no man’s land, which quadcopters easily overfly. Small tactical drones now reach miles behind lines, a condition driving harrowing changes for reaching and treating the wounded.
For more than a half-century, one durable Western military axiom held that seriously wounded soldiers should reach comprehensive medical care within 60 minutes, a time frame that casualty data suggests sharply increases survival rates. The concept of a brief, decisive window for trauma intervention — called the Golden Hour — gained currency during the Vietnam War, then became enshrined in ensuing decades as an almost sacred martial standard. In 2009, when evacuation times in Afghanistan often extended to two hours, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, citing a “moral obligation,” ordered the armed services to speed matters up. Commanders moved medevac helicopters closer to action, deployed surgical teams to remote outposts and sometimes delayed missions or reduced operational tempo when weather forecasts rendered prompt evacuations uncertain.
The rise of drones over Ukraine has utterly upended such ideals. A wounded soldier’s wait to reach a doctor now often stretches to times reminiscent of the worst of World War I. “Because of high drone activity, sometimes it might take a day or two or three of postponing an evacuation before a soldier is reached,” said Senior Lt. Daria, an anesthesiologist at a hidden emergency room, or stabilization point, near Kharkiv. (Per Ukrainian military protocol, soldiers’ surnames have been withheld.)
Weapons alone do not explain the shift. Bloodlust plays its part. Russian drone teams, Lt. Daria said, do not honor legal protections for medical workers. “In our military department at university we learned that, according to the Geneva Conventions, on the battlefield medics cannot be targeted,” she said. “In this war, this idea does not work. Evacuation teams are big priority targets for Russia.”
Frontline soldiers and those who work at stabilization points say trauma care this year has entered a grim era. As new technology erases old assumptions, soldiers with survivable wounds are dying in bunkers and trenches. Others arrive at stabilization points with limbs requiring amputation that swift medical intervention could have saved. “Everything has changed so quickly,” said Giles Duley, founder of the Legacy of War Foundation, which funds humanitarian relief in armed conflicts. In one case he discussed with a medic, a soldier waited so long that he arrived at a stabilization point with maggots in his wound. Duley, who is also a photographer, knows well the merits of speedy evacuation. In 2011, while accompanying an infantry patrol in Afghanistan, he stepped on a pressure plate that detonated an improvised explosive device at his feet. The explosion severed both legs and his left arm. Gates’s order may have saved his life: A medevac helicopter delivered him to the NATO hospital in Kandahar within 40 minutes.
Such a rapid medevac system does not exist in Ukraine. Its forces operate a small helicopter fleet, but the time required to land and load patients, along with the aircrafts’ high visibility and relatively slow speeds, would present easy targets for drones. Instead, units move casualties overland, a slower process that often becomes impossible, especially when the sun is up. “In areas where I’ve been working, they are not bringing anyone out by daylight, that’s for sure,” Duley said. “It has nothing to do with bravery; it has nothing to do with will. They simply can’t.”
These conditions, replicable by any armed force with access to inexpensive drones, are grounds for grave concern among national militaries that have yet to operate in drone-saturated environments, or expect to continue medevac practices that evolving weapons have made obsolete in Ukraine. But along the war’s roughly 800-mile-long front, a novel adaptation has gained traction.
Aleksandr served in the 13th Khartia Brigade of Ukraine’s National Guard, which formed as a volunteer unit in 2022 for the defense of Kharkiv and quickly matured into one of the country’s most sophisticated and successful combat formations. In 2024, Khartia began experimenting with ground drones, commonly called unmanned ground vehicles, or U.G.V.s, testing new models as manufacturers rolled them out. Soon it possessed a growing fleet of U.G.V.s and a cadre of pilots organized into a specialized ground-drone company that, among its missions, began evacuating the wounded and the dead. All this put Aleksandr in a situation almost no soldier had experienced before this year. One type of drone almost killed him. Another might save his life.
Alone in the meadow, Aleksandr inched toward the trees. He crawled as quickly as he could, but one-legged locomotion is slow. Sweating in summer darkness, oozing blood, he covered little ground.
His mind inventoried the dangers: artillery, blood loss, mortars, dehydration, land mines, sunrise, drones, crime. By the laws of armed conflict, a soldier in his condition was not a legal target. But law and practice often diverge in war, and both sides along the front routinely turned remote weapons on wounded enemies. Aleksandr expected no mercy if seen. He might also succumb by other means. The previous day had been sweltering. He sweated heavily before being hit. Blood loss and exertion dehydrated him more, leaving him parched. Ripped open by shrapnel and pinched by tourniquet, his left leg mercilessly throbbed. On the edge of consciousness, he moved himself along, as if, he thought, he were in a desert.
The cratered field was northeast of the ruins of Lyptsi, once a village of about 13,000 people. Russian soldiers occupied the place in 2022, but that September, Ukrainian forces drove them back, reclaiming Lyptsi before stalling short of the next village to the north, where invaders squatted in basements of collapsed buildings and bunkers beneath trees. The surrounding farmland remained bloodily contested turf.
Aleksandr crawled on, listening for drones. Each time he heard one, he curled himself under his poncho, hoping to be overlooked. It happened several times. Each time the telltale whirring faded to quiet, he peered out, steadied himself and continued. He had no idea of the hour. But the sky remained dark. He still had a chance.
His thirst grew excruciating. His energy sagged. His will weakened. “I cannot make it,” he said to the indifferent sky, then ordered his body to press on. Stuck in the open, time running low, he imagined a wonderful moment in the future, the wedding of his daughter, Yevheniia, who was 11. He felt a duty to attend. He implored the heavens for mercy, so his family would not be alone. “Please, God, protect me,” he said. “I must see them again.”
Moving by one push of his right leg at a time, he maintained a slow pace. Sometimes he lay on his back, driving himself forward by right heel. Other times he rolled onto his chest or side and pushed and clawed his way with ribs scraping ground.
A 40-year-old conscript drafted this March, Aleksandr had already experienced what the combination of new and old weapons could do. Two weeks earlier, he and three other soldiers were changing positions among deserted dachas when an explosion reverberated across a field. He recognized it as the impact of a 120-millimeter mortar round. Another screamed in and hit with a crack and blast. This one was closer.
Aleksandr scanned the sky and saw a Russian surveillance drone. He understood. They were trapped in one of war’s new routines: A drone pilot was helping a mortar crew adjust fire.
The soldiers radioed their command post. No answer. The frequency was jammed. They ran. Mortar rounds pursued them. Fighting panic, they headed for the nearest dacha. Two of them — Oleh and Shustryi — reached the building first. Aleksandr, slightly behind, paused under walnut trees in a small grove about 50 feet away.
The Russian mortar crew fired a barrage. More rounds came in, then more, a thunderous crescendo. Time seemed to pause. Flat to the ground, Aleksandr thought it might never end. He counted blasts and lost track around 20. The building took a direct hit, blowing off the roof and blasting out walls, one of which fell on Oleh. A first-person-view drone flew in and slammed into the dacha, too.
Screams pierced the air. Aleksandr shouted back: “Guys! Follow my voice!”
Shustryi ran to him. His upper left arm was ripped open, the humerus broken. The meat of his biceps hung out. Oleh, he said, was dead.
Aleksandr tightened a tourniquet above the wound, feeling hot blood on his hands. The fourth soldier, Timoha, crashed through low branches and dropped to the ground. He had broken his left hand.
Panting, the three men spread out under the trees’ enveloping canopy, hoping one mortar round would not kill them all, and awaited whatever might come next. A last round struck the building, setting it afire. Soon they no longer heard quadcopter noise. The three survivors staggered back toward friendly lines.
Two nights later, Aleksandr was assigned to retrieve Oleh’s remains. He led a patrol to the burned dacha, where the charred and mangled body rested at the entrance. The soldiers put what they found into a body bag and carried it to a trail. Around 3 a.m., a U.G.V. drove into view. About the size of a golf cart, powered by electric motors, it rolled forward almost noiselessly and stopped. The soldiers placed the bag onto its cargo bed. Oleh’s body was in a drone’s care now. Aleksandr watched it drive off. Useful tech, he thought.
Now, as he crawled south, wounded, he wondered whether he was destined for a stabilization point or a morgue.
A mortar round landed in the field. The impact was not close. He listened for drones, heard none, and continued. More impacts followed. The attack felt random, unlike the barrage that killed Oleh.
Aleksandr kept moving, growing ever more exhausted. Stalked by drowsiness, he argued with himself. Maybe, he thought, a rest would help. He could cover up with the poncho, fall asleep, wake restored and finish his crawl. Why not? No, he answered. Bad idea. He must reach the tree line before daybreak, or die. He set his right foot and gave another push.
After Aleksandr crossed the halfway point, he felt alone, but this was not so. Both forces maintained almost continuous sight of no man’s land. On this night, two Khartia pilots, who used the call signs “Casper” and “Aferyst,” flew observation missions from a basement behind the trees, watching for Russian movements and shadowing Khartia’s soldiers as they worked.
Aferyst, whose call sign means “swindler,” piloted a Matrice 4T, an off-the-shelf quadcopter with a thermal camera for night vision. Through its video feed, he had seen the explosion that wounded Aleksandr, then more flashes as the Russian drone pursued other soldiers. They escaped. Aferyst watched Aleksandr collect himself and start inching south. With his drone hovering, he informed the command post that a Ukrainian soldier had been hit out there and was crawling back.
Casper was working with a Mavic quadcopter outfitted with a small loudspeaker. Aferyst recorded an audio message on an app and shared the file with Casper, who loaded it onto his drone as dim light softened the northeastern sky.
Morning twilight began. Aleksandr looked himself over in gray light. Dirt clung to the sticky blood on his leg. His hands were similarly stained, especially his right. Flushed with adrenaline and fear, he had not noticed that he had been hit there. He pulled off the glove and tried opening and closing his hand. Blood seeped from a hole where his wrist met his palm. He could not ball a fist.
Ahead in the field, almost at the woodlot’s edge, a backpack came into view, alone on the ground. A soldier must have dropped it while running for his life. Maybe, Aleksandr thought, it contains water. Dragging his shattered leg, he came to it, slid his hand inside and felt past clothing, cigarettes and canned food. His hand met a bottle. It was a liter and a half of water. He spun off the cap and downed half the contents in long, quenching gulps. God sent me this bottle, he thought.
With water and hope came an energy boost. Aleksandr refastened the cap and threw the bottle toward the trees. It bounced several yards ahead and stopped. Like a dog, he told himself, he could play fetch until he reached cover. Whether this was delirium or clarity, he did not know. But he forced himself forward, grasped it and threw it again. He was almost there.
Drone noise filled the air. He yanked his poncho over himself. A quadcopter hovered above, shining a light. Aleksandr braced for the end.
A voice cut through the engine whine. It spoke Ukrainian. “Shatay,” it said, “crawl to shelter in the direction of the light.”
“Shatay” was Aleksandr’s call sign. Casper’s Mavic was playing the prerecorded message. Peering up into the brightening sky, Aleksandr puzzled over the quadcopter suspended above. Maybe, he thought, the Russians were trying to lead him astray.
The drone repeated itself. “Shatay,” it said, “crawl to shelter in the direction of the light.”
Dawn’s perils arrived. A Russian F.P.V. drone flew in and struck about 10 yards away — a miss. Heart pounding, Aleksandr scrambled away.
As Aleksandr accelerated, Aferyst hovered his Matrice about 650 feet above the meadow. He saw the F.P.V. drone’s errant attack — inexperienced pilot, he thought — and Aleksandr’s frantic push toward the forest. He was nearly under the canopies.
The Russian attack escalated. A dropper drone crossed the field and eased into position above the wounded man, setting up the kill at last. Aferyst would not allow it. He pushed his quadcopter into a dive, leveled it off and accelerated, planning to ram the opposing drone.
His target grew larger onscreen as the Matrice shrunk the distance. An instant before impact, the Russian drone dodged. Aferyst’s quadcopter passed so close that its camera streamed a full-screen image of racked grenades on the enemy drone’s underside.
Aferyst spun the drone around for a repeat, but the dropper drone dumped its payload harmlessly and fled. He watched it shrink onscreen and returned his drone’s lens to Aleksandr, who reached the trees. In the dank basement, Aferyst and Casper exchanged a high-five and wrapped their arms around each other, surging with joy.
Ukraine’s front lines are warrens of trenches, bunkers and decoy positions, interlocking earthworks designed to confuse and stop attackers. Aleksandr’s crawl brought him near a fake machine-gun position, built to trick Russians into wasting time and ammunition. He wriggled under its camouflage netting and lay still, the safest he had been in hours. He was spent, disoriented and unsure what had just happened. He wondered how he had survived the last attack.
A shout sounded through the greenery: “Shatay! Where are you?”
“I’m here!” he yelled back.
Two Ukrainian soldiers stepped into view. One, who used the call sign “Merefa,” was middle-aged, with a calm, hardened demeanor. “How are you?” he asked.
“I am happier to see you than I have been to see anyone in my life,” Aleksandr said.
“Where are you wounded?”
Aleksandr showed his right arm and left leg. “Can you walk?” the soldier asked.
“I can jump on one leg,” he said.
His rescuers stood him up. He looped his arms over their shoulders and the trio set out running in a five-legged gait with his shattered left leg up. They weaved through tree trunks and undergrowth; sometimes he lifted both legs to clear a downed log.
After about five minutes, the soldiers steered him to a dugout and carried him underground. This, he thought, was a proper fighting position — a covered bunker, sheltered within trees and stocked with food, cigarettes and water. It contained two bunks. Barring a direct hit from a heavy munition, or an F.P.V. drone flown by an especially skilled pilot, it offered protection. The soldiers living within rotated watches at a .50-caliber machine gun in a trench nearby.
A medic was waiting. He gave Aleksandr a pill pack with analgesic, antibiotic and anti-inflammatory meds, then cut away his left boot, removed his tourniquet and cleaned the wound. Aleksandr had not seen the damage by daylight. He shared what he had been prepared to do with his knife. The medic chuckled. “You’re crazy to have thought of cutting it,” he said. He fastened a splint and assured him the foot could be saved.
About a week earlier, another soldier had sheltered in the bunker after stepping on a land mine. The blast severed his foot, leaving him with a shattered lower-leg stump; he urgently needed blood. The battalion risked a bright-light evacuation and managed to move him to care within hours. Aleksandr was stable. His wounds did not require immediate medevac. The forecast called for rain, conditions that might ground enemy quadcopters and make a trip out safer. He would wait.
For now, Russian drones patrolled above the treetops. He heard them overhead. They’re trying to find us, he thought, and lay back to rest.
Aleksandr began 2025 as a stone mason, cutting marble and granite into precise pieces to install as stairways, counters, tables and tiles. It was good, full-time work. His life changed in the spring when he received a letter ordering him to report to a conscription office. He already knew infantry life. Twenty years earlier, he had served as a draftee in the 54th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion, which trained him as a sniper. A Kharkiv native, he lived in Khorosheve, population about 4,000, roughly a dozen miles south. His ex-wife, Anya, and their daughter lived in the city, which was often struck by Russia’s long-range drones and sometimes by heavy glide bombs. The war had entered its fourth year. His skills were in demand. He read his notice and accepted that his time to return to uniform had come.
At the enlistment office, brigades vetted recruits. A lifelong soccer player, Aleksandr exuded toughness forged by decades of physical work. He arrived strong-handed and lean, with a service history any commander could use. Khartia offered him a spot. He knew of the brigade’s reputation for innovation and for not being beholden to wasteful Soviet-style tactics. Khartia, he’d heard, was led by open minds. He would entrust it with his life. He revived his old nickname, Shatay, for his handle; it translates literally as “one who punches,” but on the streets where he grew up, it meant “ringleader” or “boss.”
After training, he was sent to bunkers north of Lyptsi, where he joined the first arc of defense around the city of his birth. The location protected civilian lives: By holding the line this far north, Ukrainian soldiers kept Russia’s army from moving artillery within range of Kharkiv’s neighborhoods.
Now incapacitated, he drifted in and out of sleep, and ate instant rice and tea his peers handed him. Leaving shelter brought risk. The soldiers urinated into empty bottles and tossed them on garbage heaps. Other toilet use was difficult for Aleksandr. Before the previous night’s patrol, he took loperamide, an antidiarrheal medication that slows digestion; some soldiers use it to prevent bowel movements on missions. Resting on a bunk, he swallowed more. Self-induced constipation beat exposing to attack those who might carry him to a latrine.
He ruminated underground, reflecting over the violence that engulfed him in two dizzying weeks. Oleh’s death had left him shaken. After he helped recover the body, his commanders sent him to a psychologist, who recommended time off. Released from duty, he traveled to Khorosheve and stayed three days. It was his first visit since spring. The contrast was surreal. The hellscape where Oleh died was a short drive away. Khorosheve was as before — familiar, peaceful, soothing.
His mother, Nadiia, maintained a beautiful garden with vegetable patches, berries and fruit trees. Raspberries and blackberries were ripe. He walked the yard, eating what he pulled from thorny canes. In the embrace of family and home, his thoughts turned realistically grim: I was lucky this time; I may not be lucky next.
He adopted a stoic demeanor. Nadiia suppressed emotion, too. But when the hour came for departure, tears flowed. The town’s small cemetery had several graves of local men killed in the war. His mother gave her pain a voice. “Please be careful,” she said, clutching her son.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I promise you I will return alive.”
Miles to the south, Ukrainian soldiers labored with tools beside a brick building in afternoon light. Members of Khartia’s U.G.V. company, they represented an emerging category of combatant: soldiers dedicated to ground-drone missions and tactics, refined through daily use.
Part dystopian steampunk workshop, part Eastern European coffee bar, the vibe defied Western and Eastern military norms. Two skateboards rested against a wall near a communal box of small, fresh pears. Almost no one was in uniform. The company commander, a 24-year-old academic from western Ukraine who used the call sign “Matematyk,” or “mathematician,” worked in black jeans and a gray tee. A senior lieutenant, call sign “Happy,” watched over the labors in skate shoes, striped shirt and shorts. A soldier at a laptop, call sign “Jess,” wore a long white dress, ordered by mail, and puffed from a pink vape pen.
The building was a motor pool. Ground drones of various sizes were parked all around. Some were rigged for carrying cargo, others for firing machine guns or automatic grenade launchers. Parts and modules were stowed alongside — tow bars for retrieving stuck U.G.V.s, rows of replacement tires, a crate for launching aerial attack drones from a ground drone operating in a mother-ship role, like a small aircraft carrier roaming the land. Matematyk called it a “hive.”
If these uses felt new, the underlying concepts were not: Remotely driven vehicles, in principle not much different from radio-controlled toy cars that children have played with for decades, have been in military use since at least World War I, when France experimented with the torpille terrestre, an electrically powered remote vehicle for delivering explosives to German trenches. Early systems worked poorly. Steering, speed, navigation and range all proved problematic. But the concept was sound, and over time, U.G.V.s assumed nonmartial forms as varied as roaming lunar vehicles and Roombas. One class of ground drone — explosive-ordnance-disposal robots, which handle undetonated bombs — became standard police and military equipment around the world. In 2016, the police in Dallas used a bomb-disposal robot to set an explosive charge that killed a barricaded gunman who had fatally shot five officers. A machine designed to save lives slipped easily into a lethal role. In hindsight, the mission creep looks inevitable.
In Ukraine, the ongoing U.G.V. rollout followed a national pivot to inexpensive drones that started with quadcopters in 2022. Ukrainian ground-drone manufacturers are now a rapidly expanding sector, and unlike the land drones of yesteryear, many of their latest models, aided by tiny cameras, sensors, software and rechargeable batteries, work reliably and well. As they arrived at brigades, soldiers applied them to frontline use: U.G.V.s shuttle supplies, put down land mines or surveillance sensors, observe enemy activities, clear mines and evacuate casualties. Equipped with machine guns or rocket launchers, they function as stealthy mobile weapons. The pitch for each task is identical: With drones, risks shouldered by people transfer to machines.
In 2024, Khartia became an enthusiastic early adopter. Last December, its remote pilots launched from around Lypsti an air-and-ground drone raid that Ukrainian media heralded as the first “robot only” complex attack in history. Its U.G.V. company still fought offensively, but its priority was logistics. At the motor pool on this day, the soldiers were preparing drones to ferry supplies to the front after dark, including a Zmiy-500, a large specimen with which they planned to carry out Aleksandr on its return leg.
Three and a half days had passed since Aleksandr was wounded. After he crawled to the forest, the brigade opted not to evacuate him immediately because of the obvious daylight perils. Then thunderstorms flashed and rolled over the ravaged land, drenching the soil. Streams swelled, bog water rose. A U.G.V. might reach him in these conditions but risked getting stuck or rolling over on the way back. Aleksandr was stable and on painkillers and antibiotics. It made little sense to risk abandonment in the open again. Commanders chose to delay until the ground firmed up.
The latest forecasts included the possibility of more storms. But the sun was warm. The soil was drying. Khartia’s brigade commander approved a plan to retrieve Aleksandr, whose leg now risked necrosis if untreated much longer.
The pilot assigned to the mission, Oleksii, was one of the company’s most experienced. He and a team of soldiers prepared the Zmiy-500 for rain, spraying foam insulation around its lights, cameras and electronics, then duct-taping sheets of black plastic over its frame. The camera and lights peered out as if from under parkas. Jess programmed a two-way digital radio for the cargo bed. If the drone reached the wounded man, they hoped to use it to talk with him, soothing him on his trip to care.
Other soldiers gathered around more drones, loading them for missions. At nightfall, troops in pickup trucks would tow the mini-armada north. From there, the drones would enter the most dangerous terrain without human crew. Pilots would operate them from a distant command center.
Conceptually, using drones this way was sound. Practically, shifting to unmanned vehicles presented challenges. Top speeds of the company’s U.G.V.s peaked at about 15 miles per hour. Many moved at less than half that — far slower than pickup trucks, which could dash to the front at 80 miles an hour or more. U.G.V.s also tended to have narrow fields of view, which made them less nimble and reactive. But Matematyk, for his part, said their compact size and slow pace lent U.G.V.s a nonintuitive advantage: They were harder to spot from the air.
Out past Lyptsi, Aleksandr suffered. His abdomen had swelled during his three-day wait. The pain was intense. Even with loperamide, he could hold back no longer. Merefa helped him from the dugout to defecate in a plastic bag. Then, in the darkness, four soldiers with a stretcher carried him to another bunker. It was close to a trail the Zmiy would travel. Soon, they said, he’d be on his way.
Aleksandr remembered his vow to his mother. He had lost his cellphone in the last dropper-drone attack. He dialed her on a borrowed device, and lied. He was calling on an unfamiliar number, he said, because his phone had been soaked by rain. All else was good. He was doing fine.
Almost simultaneously, the pilots arrived at an office that was comfortable to the point of being posh, with a well-appointed conference room, decorative plants, an espresso machine, a custom-made chess set and Bluetooth speakers playing jazz. Fresh fruit sat in bowls. This was their command center, from where they would drive drones to the front. Khartia’s head of unmanned forces, who uses the call sign “Miami,” said its atmosphere was deliberate: To attract the smartest soldiers, including talent under the national conscription age of 25, units seeking to evolve as quickly as Ukraine’s survival required should foster a culture of innovation over conformity. “They should think that they work in an I.T. company,” he said, “and that they are much smarter than Russians, who deserve to die like dogs in the trenches.”
The first leg of the ground drone’s journey began. Shortly after dark, far back from the front, two soldiers released the Zmiy from its trailer. Inside the command center, video from the drone’s cameras streamed on a monitor in front of Oleksii, the pilot, who leaned forward on a swiveling office chair and drove the Zmiy via a small, off-the-shelf handset. The drone proceeded north along a road.
Soon it passed empty bus stops and unlit businesses and homes, now and then skirting puddles. Two helmeted soldiers went by on electric bicycles, heading south. Intermittent fighting continued behind them. Khartia’s observation drones generally accompany the U.G.V.s as they travel. Out at the front, Aferyst and Casper had been assigned to the mission, but a Russian fixed-wing Molniya drone hit the building they hid beneath, setting it ablaze. Choked by smoke as the rubble burned, they could not participate; the mission was transferred to another team.
Oleksii’s drone approached the emptied village of Borshchova, about 10 miles north of Kharkiv and roughly equidistant from the Russian border. Russian F.P.V. drones often imperiled the route, but Khartia had sunk tall poles into the dirt on either shoulder and strung netting to entangle quadcopters.
Oleksii was 28, a hydrogeologist with a degree from Kharkiv National University and a lifelong resident of the city. In 2024 he joined Khartia, which trained him as a pilot that summer. He wore his affinity for automated weapons loudly: His left forearm displayed a tattoo of the Terminator, Hollywood’s apotheosis of the killer ground drone, along with the Latin adage “Si vi pacem, para bellum.” If you seek peace, it means, prepare for war.
He steered through a neighborhood and caught up with another U.G.V. also heading north. His drone traveled behind it until they reached an intersection, where the pair parted ways. Weaving the Zmiy between wider and narrower trails, he passed branches of downed trees before entering Lyptsi. Weeds stood tall in the center of roads. The Zmiy was in a zone where anything could be hit by Russian weapons at any time. The company had lost 14 U.G.V.s on missions; their remains were scattered along the way.
The Zmiy reached the Lypets River, a narrow, slow-moving stream now slightly swollen. Pilots had many options for crossing points, and Oleksii had selected a crude earthen berm over a culvert. The drone pulled up to the bank at about 11:30 p.m., but the culvert was destroyed. In its place was a fresh, steep-sided crater. Oleksii paused at its lip. Matematyk stood behind him, assessing the damage on the monitor. He frowned. “Krasnopol,” he said, with resignation — a laser-guided artillery projectile with a range of about 12 miles. Russian troops had destroyed the berm. The Zmiy could not cross here.
Oleksii backed the drone up and drove in a wide loop, following a weedy trail to lower ground. In about 20 minutes, he managed to cross the streambed and accelerate onto another dirt road. Here the Zmiy, whose name means “snake,” showed its power. The road grew narrower until it was no road at all. Tall vegetation, some of it finger-thick, clogged the way. Oleksii drove straight through, plowing over saplings, maintaining speed. The drone reached the southern side of the forest, making its own path. Ahead was the rendezvous point. No soldiers were present. Oleksii parked the Zmiy with cameras running. It was just after 1 a.m. He stood, vaped and stretched. The hardest part of his mission would start soon.
About an hour later, two soldiers stepped into the drone’s view. Looking ghostly, they tugged and tore away the plastic covering the bed and began tossing out bundles of weatherproofed freight. Eleven minutes later, two more soldiers appeared, guiding Aleksandr on one leg. Bearded and gaunt, he wore a long-sleeve tee. The soldiers laid down a pad on the cargo bed, helped him climb aboard and draped a camouflage Kevlar blanket atop him. One wished him luck. “We are not saying goodbye,” he said. “We are saying, ‘See you later.’”
It was 2:18 a.m., later than anyone hoped. Oleksii pushed the drone into gear and swung its nose through the high grass. Aleksandr was jostled and banged from side to side in back. The radio did not work; Oleksii could not talk to him.
After about 20 minutes, the drone left the bumpy field and followed a trail. Oleksii sped it up and it reached the swamp within 40 minutes. The drone found its way through, came to a sloped edge to climb to firmer ground and stopped while Oleksii assessed rollover risks. Aleksandr hid. Wary of showing himself to an observation drone, he did not look out. But he smelled water, felt cooler air and understood he was in Lyptsi, making his way south.
Oleksii chose an angle. The U.G.V. climbed the bank and headed through overgrowth toward a paved road, passing an eerily empty pickup with all four doors open, abandoned on the left shoulder — a freeze-frame of others’ misfortune. It was almost 3:30 a.m., less than a half-hour before morning twilight, when more Russian drones would fly.
The Zmiy turned and sped up. Aleksandr heard a quadcopter’s terrifying whine. He flushed anew with despair. He had made it too far, stayed alive too long, to die on his way to the stabilization point.
The drone was Ukrainian. The U.G.V. continued unharmed.
As light grayed the northeastern sky, the Zmiy reached the defensive netting. Peering though a gap between the Kevlar blanket and tailgate, Aleksandr saw the poles and webbing spanned between them. His confidence rose. Maybe he would make it to a doctor after all. Rolling down the empty road in slowly brightening light, under drapes of protective netting, he felt that most wonderful feeling: relief. He lit a cigarette.
Not long after clearing the netting, the U.G.V.’s camera showed an approaching ambulance.
The Zmiy stopped. The ambulance pulled alongside. Two soldiers rushed out. One pulled off the Kevlar blanket. Aleksandr slowly sat up. He looked wobbly. “How’re you doing?” the soldier asked.
“I’m good,” he answered.
“And where’s your phone?”
“No phone,” he said. “It’s somewhere the [expletive] out in the field.”
The soldiers lifted him onto a rolling stretcher, slid it through the ambulance’s back hatch and sped away.
Minutes later, at the stabilization point, a surgical team assessed their patient. Almost 99 hours had passed since he fell wounded. He was alert — a welcome sign.
“What’s your name?” someone asked.
“Aleksandr,” he said.
“I’m going to give you a shot now, Aleksandr,” Lt. Daria said. “It will be a bit uncomfortable.”
Aleksandr slipped away, feeling as if he were in another dimension.
The team worked. Removing bandages showed the advancing risks he faced while waiting. Both thighs were peppered with holes and foreign debris. His right arm had a similar small wound. A secondary infection inflamed his left leg. A hemoglobin test revealed he was anemic from blood loss. Doctors ordered him one unit of blood, another of plasma and started to clean the ugly gash where shrapnel had blasted through. He was stable. The prognosis was good. He had survived.
That evening, Aleksandr called his mother from a hospital in Kharkiv. This time he offered a partial truth: He’d broken his leg, he said. Nadiia appeared the next morning. She saw metal rods holding his foot in place, and other bandages, and the wound vacuum, and Aleksandr’s tired dark eyes, and she knew. Tears streamed down her face, followed by sobs.
“I promised you I would remain alive,” he said, hugging her back. “And I did.”
Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting.
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