Overview

• Ukrainian medical leaders say drones have erased the “golden hour,” making armored evacuations practically impossible and elevating UGVs as lifesaving tools near the front.
• Frontline teams report active night missions that retrieved wounded soldiers and used a custom recovery robot dubbed “Mr. Hook” to tow a stranded vehicle under drone threat.
• Roughly 47% of UGV missions now focus on delivering supplies or extracting casualties, signaling a broader shift of logistics and care to uncrewed systems.
• Persistent jamming and GPS loss drive multi‑layer communications—mesh networks, Starlink, LTE, Wi‑Fi bridges, and even fiber‑optic relays—with operators reporting frequent Starlink dropouts in wooded terrain.
• FPV strikes remain the chief hazard and have destroyed vehicles, while demining efforts scale with low‑cost systems like Dropla’s €7,000 UGV backed by €2.4 million and AI mine‑mapping accuracy near 80%.