Kathrine Frich
He spent 491 days completely isolated.
Modern warfare is increasingly shaped by machines in the sky.
Every day, remote pilots use flying technology to scout terrain, drop supplies, and change how battles are fought.
Recently, one of those unmanned craft carried out a mission that nobody had ever seen before.
Cut off for months
Ukrainian soldier Kostiantin Vlasenko spent 491 days completely isolated on the frontline, according to Reuters and Digi24. For roughly sixteen months, he stayed hidden in a cramped shelter while Russian forces assumed he had been killed in action.
Ukrainian drones occasionally dropped food to keep him alive. Still, repeated ground attempts to pull him out ended in tragedy, and Vlasenko wept as he recalled the comrades who tried to reach his position.
“I already considered myself dead. You know what I mean, 491 days in which I was practically alone…” Vlasenko told Reuters, as cited by Digi24. Speaking about the soldiers who tried to save him, he added: “They died on the way to me… They didn’t make it… They are heroes…”
Trapped in his tiny hiding spot, he faced a horrific medical crisis on his own.
“There were terrible moments when I amputated my own leg. It could not be saved, so I decided to cut it off. I cut it off, applied a tourniquet and bandaged it immediately. Then I loosened the tourniquet, because the bleeding had stopped,” he said, according to the outlet.
Saved from the sky
Eventually, the wounded fighter lost both of his legs and gave up all hope of survival, Digi24 reported. He even wanted his unit to stop trying to rescue him so no more fellow soldiers would die on the way.
Then a pilot from Ukraine’s 30th Mechanized Brigade flew in a heavy six-engine drone, known as a hexacopter, to lift him out by air.
Vlasenko told reporters that the loud machine sounded like a landing helicopter, calling the noise the “rumble of salvation” and noting that the moment even left an unforgettable taste in his mouth.
After surviving more than a year of frontline terror, only one thing worried him as the drone lifted him into the sky, according to Digi24. “I was not afraid of flying, nor that I might fall somewhere, in a forest. But I was afraid that I might fall into the water, because I don’t know how to swim,” he said.
