Russian FPV drones have made casualty evacuation in the Donetsk sector so difficult that medical vehicles can no longer drive right up to combat positions.

Maksym Shtrul, commander of the 3rd Medical Company of the 1st Separate Medical Battalion of Ukraine’s Ground Forces, said this on Army FM radio.

He said the 1st Separate Medical Battalion operates in the Donetsk sector and provides much of the medical support for towns and settlements close to the front.

The medic noted that the situation in this sector remains extremely difficult. Constant shelling and FPV drone attacks severely restrict movement.

“Moving around calmly and feeling at ease here is fairly difficult. The enemy is constantly complicating things and making the situation worse,” he said.

He explained how much medical evacuation has changed compared with 2022 and 2023.

Back then, armoured or even unarmoured vehicles could drive to within a few hundred metres of the line of contact, and sometimes even enter the grey zone to collect casualties directly from their positions.

That is now effectively impossible.

“Today that sounds completely absurd, because no vehicle will reach the positions. Movement to the positions is now mostly on foot,” the medical company commander said.

The format of medical evacuation has also changed substantially, he said. Previously the main threats to evacuation vehicles were artillery strikes and drops from Mavics. Now the principal danger comes from FPV drones.

Medical vehicles have had to be significantly modified as a result. Evacuation teams now use heavily armoured vehicles fully protected by anti-drone netting.

Even so, such a vehicle cannot safely drive within several hundred metres of the line of contact.

In some cases, casualties are still evacuated directly by armoured vehicles.

According to Shtrul, however, this is the exception rather than standard practice. Commanders are forced to take such decisions in extreme situations, when a casualty has to be recovered at any cost.

Even an armoured vehicle remains a vulnerable target. A vehicle going in to collect a casualty, or a pickup carrying medics, may be a more attractive target for the enemy than an unmanned ground vehicle, since it is larger and more visible, he stressed.

The spread of FPV drones has thus fundamentally changed not only combat tactics but the very principles of evacuating casualties from the forward edge.

Medics now have to cover much of the route to the positions on foot, and sending an evacuation vehicle directly to the troops has become an exceptional and extremely risky decision.

As ArmyInform reported earlier, two unmanned ground vehicles of the 92nd Brigade evacuated five wounded soldiers in a single run.