The Russia-Ukraine war has evolved into a technological arms race, with uncrewed machines playing a central role across every domain of combat. The skies are now filled with aerial drones, and their kill zone continues to expand in all directions. Drones have revolutionised warfare on land and at sea, too. The latest development is the use of ground robots and their incipient transformation of frontline medicine.

For Ukraine, unmanned systems have become a necessity in fighting a larger and better‑resourced enemy. With no sign of the war ending anytime soon, and with Russia willing to expend seemingly endless numbers of people, Kyiv is turning to technology to help ease the pressure on its mobilisation effort and to preserve the lives of its soldiers.

Ukrainian soldiers must often stay on the frontlines for weeks at a time. In one recent case, unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) rescued three wounded Ukrainian soldiers who had been stranded near the front for more than a month—that is, stranded with their wounds for more than a month.

Colonel Kostiantyn Humeniuk, the chief surgeon of the Medical Forces of Ukraine, said in an interview with the author, ‘As of today, the war has fundamentally changed because our enemy uses modern unmanned aerial vehicles.’ He added, ‘on the battlefield, armoured vehicles are almost absent.’

‘So we are faced with a modern war where drones are the main type of weapon. Today, in the theatre of war, almost all the injuries we see among our service members are drone-related injuries.’

According to Humeniuk, the biggest challenge is that they’ve lost the golden hour—the period in which medical attention has a higher chance of saving someone suffering traumatic injury. The army can no longer evacuate wounded from combat zones quickly. ‘That’s the most serious problem. Evacuating a wounded soldier from the battlefield using any kind of armoured vehicle, medical or otherwise, is practically impossible,’ Humeniuk said. ‘Drones have shown that they are low-visibility. They don’t make much noise and are almost unnoticeable on the battlefield.’

Volodymyr Rovenskyi, an officer in the ground force’s Department for the Development of Ground Control Systems for Unmanned Systems, said in a briefing that 47 percent of Ukrainian UGV missions involved delivering supplies or evacuating soldiers.

The work is still far from safe. Units avoid operating UGVs during daylight hours, as movement of the machines is easy to spot and they are highly vulnerable to strikes from first-person view drones (FPVs). Third Assault Brigade soldier Kostas, known as El Greco, said FPVs were ‘the number-one threat to UGVs.’

UGVs’ primary roles were ‘logistics and evacuation, followed by engineering tasks, and finally kamikaze strikes or fire support,’ he said.

Lyuba Shipovich, chief executive of Dignitas—a non-profit that supports the military—and head of the Victory Robots project for deploying UGVs, said ‘returning both the wounded and the dead’ was now one of the main functions of ground robots.

But it’s not as simple as it seems. Connectivity remains one of the biggest challenges. Soldiers cannot risk being evacuated on a ground robot that loses its radio-control signal or satellite navigation or suffers a technical failure, leaving it stranded and the casualty exposed to drone strikes. To counter this, frontline units are experimenting with multiple, parallel channels for connectivity—such as wi‑fi mesh networks, Starlink satellite links and LTE terrestrial networks—to keep the robots online.

Analogue radio systems make ground robots highly susceptible to enemy jamming, so most units are trying to move to multi‑node networks with data relaying combined with satellite control links. This greatly improves resilience. However, these upgrades significantly raise costs, which are already a barrier to widespread adoption.

But the effectiveness of these missions also improves when combined with other efforts to distract the enemy. ‘During evacuation missions, especially when we’re evacuating wounded soldiers, we need distraction manoeuvres, artillery support and drones to ensure the soldier is evacuated as safely as possible,’ said Shipovich.

‘In our last 60 missions, we lost two UGVs, one due to operator error, one to an FPV drone,’ said Eugene, callsign ‘Kharkiv’, a UGV company commander in the 92nd Assault Brigade. One member of the unit, a former software engineer in his late twenties, has built custom software to enhance the UGVs’ functionality. This is part of a trend in which engineers in workshops across the front are tinkering and testing to improve their UGVs.

These ground robots are only beginning to transform frontline medicine, carrying out more and more evacuations. They are also taking on an increasing share of logistical work. In time, Ukraine’s frontline commanders expect to deploy many more robots across the front, continuing to wage asymmetrical warfare against Russia.

Ukrainian electronic warfare expert Serhii (‘Flash’) Beskrestnov believes that, in the future, infantry will stay underground, with only robots operating on the surface and taking the greatest risks.

Even if Western military planners believe they can establish air dominance in future conflicts, Ukraine shows how modern battlefields can still turn into battles of grinding attrition. Preparing for that possibility is no less essential than working to prevent it.