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Heavy-lift drone evacuates wounded Ukrainian soldier from frontline kill zone
Heavy-lift drone evacuates wounded Ukrainian soldier from frontline kill zone
A Ukrainian soldier was flown from a heavily monitored frontline area in Kharkiv region by a purpose-built cargo drone after ground evacuation attempts failed.
Artem Lytvyn, 25, was wounded when his rifle triggered a magnetic mine a few hundred metres from his unit’s destination near the Russian border. The blast shattered his right leg and fatally wounded another soldier. Lytvyn applied tourniquets and remained concealed for eight days while supplies and painkillers were dropped to him by drone.
Four remote-controlled ground vehicles became stuck in mud and difficult terrain. A stretcher team covered only about 11 kilometres in five days, leaving Lytvyn without a viable conventional route out of the expanding drone-surveillance zone.
His brigade then used a SkyFall heavy-lift unmanned aircraft capable of carrying about 150 kilograms. The six-rotor craft carried a capsule beneath it and transported Lytvyn out in a rescue described by its pilots as complex and risky.
H. Garcia--JDB
