For 33 days, a Ukrainian soldier lay trapped in the front lines, his life balanced on a single tourniquet after a landmine tore through his foot. Six rescue attempts had failed. Vehicles were shredded in the so-called "kill zone," a stretch of territory watched by enemy drones, riddled with mines, and effectively off-limits to human rescuers.
Yet the soldier's comrades refused to surrender. On the seventh attempt, a seven-hour mission brought salvation, not by human hands, but through robotics. An armoured unmanned ground vehicle, shaped like a casket and nicknamed the MAUL, crawled more than 40 miles (65 kilometers) behind enemy lines, traversing mined roads and dodging relentless surveillance.
One of its wheels was shredded by a mine en route, and an enemy drone tried to strike as it carried the soldier back, but the capsule's armour held. Against every expectation, the soldier returned alive. "If the fighter didn't give up, we had no right to give up," say the medics of Ukraine's First Separate Medical Battalion, the team behind the daring rescue. Video footage below shows the MAUL inching forward through Russian-controlled territory, its metal wheels grinding over debris and dirt, unfazed by explosions.
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