A Russian drone knocked out the robot sent to evacuate two wounded Ukrainian assault troops. Their company commander went in himself. He drove into the kill zone in an unarmored pickup truck, without body armor, and carried them out.

The Joint Forces Group released the footage on 16 August 2026. It identified the commander as Vladyslav Polskyi of the 475th Separate Assault Regiment (Code 9.2).

The two soldiers had captured Russian positions and were pulling back when Russian Molniya drones hit them, the group said. Both were seriously wounded and could not move on their own. A ground robot was sent to pull them out. A second drone hit it, and it stopped in the open, leaving the men exposed.

The group framed the rescue as the reason the regiment's soldiers take on the hardest assaults when others hold back: they know their commanders do not hide behind them, and will give everything to save every one of their men.

In June, Ukrainian ground robots ran nearly 17,000 supply and evacuation runs, taking on the exposed trips that used to get crews killed. Ukraine now fields some 25,000 combat robots. Their main limit, a presidential adviser says, is not hardware but staying connected under jamming, and a new Ukrainian antenna is meant to help. But no antenna stops what happened here. A drone hit the evacuation robot and knocked it out.

When the robot failed, the risk it was built to absorb fell back on the commander.