When two wounded Ukrainian soldiers got stranded in the open near the front line in the Kharkiv region, their commander made a quick decision that would change his life. Vladyslav Polskyi, a 29-year-old former science teacher who joined the army in 2023, was watching the scene unfold on a screen at his command post about 15 km (9 miles) away. One of the men was still strapped to a land drone that had been immobilized by a Russian strike. The other had crawled into a ditch. Between them and safety stretched the “kill zone” — ground riddled with mines and patrolled by aerial drones ready to attack anything that moved.
Polskyi, whose call-sign is “Teacher,” got into his grey pick-up truck and drove toward the danger. He wasn’t wearing a helmet or body armour. He just went.
A Rescue That Caught the Country’s Attention
The mission took place on August 15, and it wasn’t even his own soldiers who were trapped. The two wounded men belonged to another battalion. Polskyi told reporters he acted because he would want the same done for him. “If it had happened to me, I would’ve wanted them to come take me away, and not just leave me there,” the junior lieutenant said.
Days later, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy awarded him the Hero of Ukraine, the country’s highest military honour, at Independence Day celebrations in Kyiv. “People must be taken care of. Thank you, Vladyslav!” Zelenskiy said when announcing the award.
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The rescue was captured on surveillance drone footage obtained exclusively by the outlet from Polskyi’s unit, the 475th Assault Regiment. The video shows his truck racing down a gravel road before turning and reversing quickly toward the damaged drone. Journalists on the scene verified the exact location using the full-length footage, though the regiment asked for the specific spot not to be disclosed for security reasons.
The Limits of Battlefield Technology
The incident highlighted a growing problem for Ukrainian forces. Kyiv has been using remote-controlled unmanned ground vehicles to handle dangerous tasks like evacuations, hoping to keep soldiers out of harm’s way. But the Russian drone that struck the evacuation vehicle knocked out its Starlink terminal, cutting the link with its pilot and leaving it dead on the battlefield.
One wounded soldier lay helpless on the four-wheeled vehicle under open sky, his right foot dangling from the bone. The other had managed to get to a ditch off the road and was hiding in the vegetation. At a nearby command post, a 22-year-old drone-platoon leader called “Malyi” watched the rescue play out on screens in real time. “Everyone in the command centre was shocked,” he said. A single Russian drone or land mine could have killed all three men, he added.
Polskyi, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, hoisted both men onto his truck and drove back, managing to evade Russian drones that had been detected heading toward the new target.
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The episode shows how far battlefield robotics have come, and how far they still have to go. The rescue mission demonstrated that technology still can’t fully replace human judgment under fire — especially when a single drone strike can disable an entire evacuation operation. The slow, rudimentary vehicles remain vulnerable, and soldiers still have to make split-second decisions in situations where equipment fails.
Polskyi said he remembered the fear in the men’s eyes when he reached them. He was afraid too.
Both sides in the conflict regularly post videos of drones hunting down soldiers in the kill zone. Ukraine says it is killing or wounding around 30,000 Russian soldiers a month — a figure Moscow disputes as exaggerated. The rescue near Kharkiv, however, wasn’t about drones or statistics. It was about two men who couldn’t move and one who refused to leave them behind.
