Ukrainian drone flies wounded soldier from front line

Ukraine's 92nd Separate Assault Brigade published video showing a wounded soldier being lifted from the front line by an Ayudag-6 hexacopter after the aircraft descended, the man secured himself to an onboard winch and was flown to a safer position. The brigade's drone unit said the operation saved the soldier, who is now receiving treatment and rehabilitation and is out of life-threatening danger; the exact location of the evacuation was not disclosed. Manufacturer Gurzuf Defence said the man had spent nearly a year and a half in a highly exposed combat position and could not have been retrieved by conventional means, and the drone operator is audible greeting him as he was recovered.

The brigade described the mission as a world first, marking the first reported use of an aerial drone to evacuate a wounded fighter, complementing Ukraine’s prior use of unmanned ground vehicles for battlefield casualty removal. The rescue coincided with frontline testing of a separate StarGate medical-evacuation drone able to carry up to 150 kilograms on a stretcher. Together these developments demonstrate a new medevac capability for extracting personnel from locations too dangerous for human rescue teams and signal rapid field adoption of rotary-wing unmanned systems for combat search-and-rescue.