In the night time gloom a badly-wounded Ukrainian with blast injuries to both legs is loaded up into a ground drone before another casualty gingerly steps into the unmanned vehicle.
This frontline agonising nightmare is the start of a journey of several hours as an operator 15 miles away carefully dodges mines and Russian troops to get his comrades to safety. Both men, who survived, were wounded in fighting in Pokrovsk and are just two of the hundreds of victims of battle whose lives are saved by Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) a-month.
Their journey to salvation took so long it starts in the dark and ends in daylight as military medics collect them in a pickup and load up the UGV.
They were hit by a Russian Kamikaze drone, then rescued by a Ukrainian drone as the war slips rapidly into one of humans increasingly integrating with machines. Former Ukrainian soldier Oleksii Konic, 43, is one of the experts, along with business partner Svitlan Molodchenko fighting to produce battlefield drones to help Ukraine win the war.
