It was the dead of night, and the Ukrainian infantryman was writhing in a tree line from serious injuries to his legs, shoulder and lung.
His unit had told him by radio that they could not send anyone to evacuate him. The road to their base in the nearby city of Kostiantynivka had become a kill zone. “There were too many drones flying around,” recalled the infantryman, Oleh Chausov, as he described the experience.
Instead, he was told, the brigade would try to get him out with a small, robot-like tracked vehicle remotely operated from miles away and less visible to Russian drones than an armored carrier.
When the vehicle arrived, Mr. Chausov dragged himself aboard, his wounded legs dangling. But within 20 minutes, the vehicle hit a mine and blew up, he said. Miraculously, Mr. Chausov survived, crawled out and took shelter in a nearby trench.
He was back to square one, still trapped on the battlefield.
After a vehicle evacuating Mr. Chausov hit a mine, his unit sent a second vehicle. It carried him under cover of darkness for several hours, finally reaching Kostiantynivka at dawn, passing a building still ablaze from a recent strike. There, a medical team pulled Mr. Chausov out and rushed him to a hospital. Now recovering in western Ukraine, Mr. Chausov is still unsure how he made it out.
“There were so many drones,” he said in a recent phone interview. “It was a nightmare.”
The operation in May — detailed in separate accounts from Mr. Chausov and an officer from his unit, the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, and captured in drone footage shared with The New York Times — underscores the dire conditions Ukrainian troops face defending Kostiantynivka.
Russian forces have carved out a 10-mile-deep pocket around the Ukrainian troops defending Kostiantynivka, partly surrounding them from the east, south and west. Practically every movement in that pocket is targeted by Russian drones around the clock, according to a half-dozen Ukrainian soldiers and officers fighting in the area. Troops are often stranded for weeks without rotation or the possibility of evacuating the wounded.
“Before, they could hit targets within two or three kilometers,” or less than two miles, said the commander of the unit operating crewless vehicles in the 93rd Brigade, who asked to be identified by only his first name, Oleksandr, according to military protocol. “Now, they’re striking every 10 to 20 minutes at a consistent range of 15 kilometers from the front line. Everything within that 15-kilometer zone is being destroyed.”