In eastern Ukraine, quiet nights in the dim corridors of a front-line medical post can shatter in an instant. Medics roused from sleep rush to meet another stretcher wheeled in from the Donetsk front.
They work with urgency — chest compressions and shouted commands — until it becomes clear that the soldier arrived too late. The room falls silent as his body is sealed in a white bag.
He could not be saved, the anesthesiologist said, because evacuation took too long. By the time he reached the stabilization point, he was already dead.
It was not an isolated case, but part of a broader shift in the war where medical evacuation has become increasingly difficult.
“Because of drones … that can reach far, the danger is there for the wounded themselves and now for the crews working to get them out,” said Daryna Boiko, the anesthesiologist from the “Ulf” medical service of the 108th Da Vinci Wolves Battalion. “That’s why the main difficulty now is transport.”
In the early months of Russia’s full-scale invasion, evacuation vehicles could reach almost to the front line, giving the wounded a better chance of survival.
Now, the heavy use of first-person-view (FPV) drones, which let an operator see the target before striking, has turned areas up to 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the front line into kill zones. Medics say they have not treated gunshot wounds for months, and most injuries now come from FPVs.
The drones are the most feared weapon, both because of their precision and because they reduce survival chances for those already injured by complicating the evacuation.
For Ukraine’s outnumbered army, that makes preserving crew even harder.
The growing use of FPVs has also made moving the wounded between points more difficult, said the commander of the 59th Brigade medical unit with call sign Buhor, who spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
“Everything is getting harder — the work has to be more mobile, the way we operate changes and the level of safety changes,” he said.
Asked whether those conditions have increased mortality among the wounded, he replied: “Significantly. There’s nothing you can do. Everything burns from those FPVs — everything, even tanks.”
He explained that the munitions carry a charge from a rocket-propelled grenade — a shoulder-fired weapon that launches an explosive designed to pierce armored vehicles. When it blasts, a jet of molten metal and fragments penetrate the cabin at extreme temperatures….
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