Ukraine's military evacuates wounded soldier with aerial drone

Ukraine's military says it carried out a front-line medical evacuation by aerial drone — an apparent world-first for the drone-savvy nation — as Russia's full-scale invasion nears the five-year mark. 

The Ukrainian Ground Forces' 92nd Assault Brigade said Monday that it had evacuated a wounded soldier from the front line using a heavy-lift aerial drone. 

For almost 500 days, soldier Konstantyn Vlasenko of the 30th Separate Brigade was stuck in a position out of reach for Ukrainian ground forces or robots due to dense mining and heavy Russian drone activity, according to Ukrainian news outlets, including some linked with the military. 

The reports said Vlasenko was wounded by a Russian drone earlier this year while trapped, forcing him to carry out partial self-amputations of both of his legs as he hoped for a rescue.

A Ukrainian-made Gurzuf Defence heavy hexacopter, originally configured as an attack drone to drop bombs on Russian positions, was used for the rescue operation — provided to the military free of charge, according to the statement from the 92nd Brigade. 

Specialists worked with the company to modify the unmanned aircraft to carry a person without flipping or swinging them, and the new configuration was tested before the rescue was planned. 

Four different Ukrainian brigades were involved in the complex operation, which took seven days to prepare, though the actual rescue only took about an hour and 15 minutes. In that time, the drone flew almost 40 miles, with Ukrainian units using other drones to distract the Russian military, the brigade said.

Gurzuf Defence co-founder Pavlo Feldbloom told CBS News the company "never set out to create a platform designed exclusively for evacuation; instead, we developed a heavy-duty, modular, multi-mission platform."

He said the company understood, however, that a drone capable of carrying such a payload should also be capable of carrying out rescue missions. 

"At the same time, we do not believe that aerial evacuation will become a routine, large-scale practice," he said, as the "risks to a wounded person in the air are simply too high." 

"Aerial transport is the last resort — an option to be used only when there is no other way to save a person's life," Feldbloom said.

Before the aerial evacuation, there was an attempt to rescue Konstantyn using a ground drone, another technique pioneered by Ukrainian forces during the war, but it was destroyed on its way to him, according to the Ukrainian Armed Forces 2nd Mechanized Battalion.

When Vlasenko landed, he described his evacuation flight as calm and said he was relieved to be back on friendly ground.