Elderly woman fleeing war fighting rescued by Ukraine robot

The Ukrainian military has published footage showing a robot rescuing an elderly woman from the front lines in eastern Ukraine as Kyiv expands its use of ground-based drones against Russian troops.

The 77-year-old was safely relocated from an area close to the embattled eastern town of Lyman after being spotted picking her way through a crater-damaged road and the bodies of slain residents, Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps said in a statement posted on social media.

Both Russia and Ukraine have heavily invested in drone technology since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbor on February 24, 2022. The two countries have been locked in a closely watched drone race, both battling to upgrade their designs quicker than the other.

While Ukraine’s flying drones and explosive-laden uncrewed boats are well known, Kyiv’s growing fleet of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have attracted far less attention.

These robots are designed to keep human beings away from danger and perform various tasks, such as evacuating areas with injured personnel, minelaying, and hurtling toward a target and detonating.

On Friday, the Ukrainian military posted a video over three minutes long that shows a woman hunched over, clutching two walking sticks as she moves slowly along a long road. The footage, apparently filmed by at least one airborne drone and the ground-based system, then shows the unidentified woman approaching the robot and climbing aboard.

Soldiers deployed the robot with a blanket bearing the message, “Grandma, sit down!” the Ukrainian military said.

A later snippet shows an armed soldier in Ukrainian uniform helping the woman from the robot before she is transported away under the cover of darkness.

The evacuation took a total of four hours, the 3rd Army Corps said. Three more civilians walking in the vicinity were escorted by drones to an evacuation point, the military added.

The woman’s home was destroyed by fighting between Russian and Ukrainian troops, the military said.

Lyman, a key rail hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, was initially taken by Russian forces shortly after the Kremlin began its invasion push in February 2022.

It was then reclaimed by Ukrainian troops during Kyiv’s lightning counteroffensive in fall 2022, widely seen as one of Ukraine’s most successful campaigns of the war.

Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk are collectively known as the Donbas region. Russia claims to have annexed the Donbas, along with the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of southern Ukraine.

Moscow annexed Crimea, the peninsula to the south of mainland Ukraine, in 2014.

Russia has repeatedly claimed to have taken control of all of Luhansk, although Ukraine has not confirmed this. Moscow has captured about three-quarters of Donetsk. 

The annexed regions are internationally recognized as Ukrainian territory and are a key sticking point in now-stalled peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.

Russia’s top soldier, General Valery Gerasimov, said last week that Russian soldiers had seized 70 percent of Lyman.

However, U.S.-based analysts with the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank that tracks daily changes to the front line, said shortly after that it had not seen evidence to indicate Moscow had taken control of any territory in the town.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said earlier this month that Ukrainian soldiers had retaken territory captured by Russian forces using only unmanned robots for the first time in more than four years of all-out war. Several Russian soldiers “surrendered” to the Ukrainian robots, Zelensky said.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry had said earlier in April that ground robots completed more than 9,000 combat and logistics missions on the front line in March alone, an increase from under 3,000 in November.

Up to 30 percent of Ukraine’s infantry forces could be immediately replaced by ground drones, Alexander Kamyshin, one of Zelensky’s advisers who previously headed up Kyiv’s Strategic Industries Ministry, said in March. This could surge to 80 percent further down the line, Kamyshin said.

“You can argue the numbers or the timeline, but the shift is undeniable,” he added. “UGVs are a game changer.”

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