They've been doing drone evacuations for years. What makes this different is the drone is flying.
Without knowing more details it would seem to be a lot less risk to transport wounded soldiers in those MAUL armored sarcophagus type of containers, than to be airborne and exposed to enemy fire.
Bigger drones would be slower and easier to spot, but even then - if you're not ready and waiting it'll be gone before you have time to react. The only consistent solution for anti-drone warfare is automated. Or nets.
But you're right. Airborne things behind opposing lines are harder to destroy. Still doable, though, with missiles and drones. I guess the hope here is it's fast enough to evade drones and also that the Russians aren't going to want to risk expensive aircraft and pilots to kill a guy that might die anyway or be too disabled to return to the fight.
> “Due to intense enemy drone activity and the presence of landmines, evacuation using conventional unmanned ground vehicles was impossible,”
In other hand you have 3 axis plus if you reduce proportion you can at any moment without adding any power dodge enemy. Skilled operator may be able to hit and this is why they added swarm of suicide drones to protect carrier
Simple. Soldier left as is will survive with probability=0. UAV medevac has probability of success strictly > 0.
In the situation that Ukraine is, which is a desperate lack of money, ammunition ("thanks" to the US), weapons and soldiers, anything that purely exists to lift troop morale is already worth the effort, and if it even saves only one brave defender, it is more than worth it.
Except in reality they largely don't. Exceptions are the prison squads and alike, but the majority of the russian army consists of volunteers whose numbers are limited and Putin had to openly declare repeatedly there will be no mass mobilisation and those who are mobilized not put to combat in Ukraine. So despite some soviet military doctrin remaining, also the russian side had to learn soldiers are not expendable. (remember they had to bring in Korean soldiers?)
Putin also declared he didn't want a war with Ukraine mere days before he started one [1]. You cannot believe a word that comes out of the mouth of any Russian official.
And yet they're still sending in troops with barely any ammunition worth the name. The Russian M.O. against the Ukrainian fortifications still is meatwaves.
> remember they had to bring in Korean soldiers?
And from what one can hear from the usual milblogger/OSINT/analyst crowd, the NK troops face brutal casualty rates as well [1].
For NK it's still a good deal, enough will survive the ordeal and return that they can teach their own army a bit about modern warfare.
[1] https://kyivindependent.com/north-korean-troops-took-over-7-...
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/08/20/russia-and-ukraine-a...
And, if this method got "industrialized", they'll probably use survey drones to do a scan first before more expensive bigger drone gets deployed.
Damn, how long they been fighting now? Years, as far as I can remember. You know sometime I think human beings don't deserve anything pass the tree stick age.
It becomes a whole lot more complicated if you have other options and have to implement triage.
Probability of death = 1 vs probability of death < 1.