While the brigade didn’t say in the video when the operation occurred, it said the soldier had been trapped at a shelter near Siversk, a town in Donetsk, where fighting is still ongoing.<\/p>\n
“The enemy was in front, behind, and on both flanks. Completely surrounded,” Mykola Hrytsenko, a junior lieutenant serving as the brigade’s chief of staff, said in the video.<\/p>\n
The soldier, whom the brigade identified by the call sign Tankist, was the only survivor of four Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the area, Hrytsenko said.<\/p>\n
“The Siversk direction is known for incredibly difficult logistics. Almost none exists there. Guys have to walk six to seven kilometers on foot to reach a position,” he said.<\/p>\n
Hrytsenko said his team crafted an evacuation plan that involved heavy cargo drones, such as the Baba Yaga<\/a> or Heavy Shot, carrying a bicycle with an electric motor to the exhausted soldier’s position.<\/p>\n Such drones are typically used in Ukraine as bombers and are designed to deliver payloads of about 40 to 50 pounds, though they can also airlift cargo.<\/p>\n Carrying a nearly 90-pound e-bike, Hrytsenko said, would push the drone to its limits and shorten its range to roughly 2 kilometers.<\/p>\n It took three attempts, brigade says<\/p>\n Hrytsenko said his team initially lost two drones trying to deliver e-bikes to the soldier. The first was shot down with the bike, while the second crashed because its motors burned out, he added.<\/p>\n But the “Rubizh” brigade published clips of the third drone carrying the bike via a winch system and the soldier appearing to receive the bike. Business Insider could not independently verify the authenticity of the brigade’s footage.<\/p>\n Related stories<\/p>\n Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know<\/p>\n Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know<\/p>\n Hrytsenko said the bike’s parts were disassembled and brought to a nearby position on the frontline. Afterward, the vehicle was put together and flown to the soldier, he added.<\/p>\n “Everyone in HQ was shouting and crying like we’d just launched the first plane in the sky,” Hrytsenko said of the moment when the bike arrived.<\/p>\n The brigade also showed surveillance drone footage of a soldier riding an e-bike through the battlefield.<\/p>\n Hrytsenko said that while the soldier later struck a land mine, he was able to walk several hundred meters to a nearby friendly position, where drone pilots flew in another e-bike so he could fully exit the combat zone.<\/p>\n “The operation cost us two lost e-bikes, around 100,000, and two lost HeavyShot drones, $15,000 each,” Hrytsenko said, likely referring to 100,000 hryvnias, or about $2,340.<\/p>\n The brigade said the soldier evacuated safely and showed interview clips of a man it said was Tankist. BI could not independently verify his identity.<\/p>\n Hrytsenko added that the e-bikes were funded via donations from volunteers, a common occurrence in Ukraine, where units have to crowdfund for drones and weapons.<\/a><\/p>\n “If you see a strange fundraiser for an e-bike, or a unicycle, don’t be surprised. Maybe it will save a life,” he said.<\/p>\n First-person-view, or FPV, drones have been used for many non-combat functions during the war, such as dropping small items<\/a> on the battlefield or compelling soldiers to surrender<\/a> via loudspeaker.<\/p>\n However, this marks one of the first times such a drone has been used to deliver a large asset like a vehicle during ongoing fighting. Given that the size of the payload may make a drone easier to spot while limiting its range, it’s unclear if this tactic will become more commonplace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Ukrainian brigade said it used first-person-view drones to deliver e-bikes to a surrounded soldier, marking a rare…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[114368,57168,31474,114371,31239,2066,64416,2000,299,114369,114367,52761,114370,23778,657,27871,359],"class_list":{"0":"post-313836","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-4th-brigade","9":"tag-battlefield","10":"tag-bike","11":"tag-clip","12":"tag-drone","13":"tag-e-bike","14":"tag-electric-motor","15":"tag-eu","16":"tag-europe","17":"tag-fpv-drone","18":"tag-mykola-hrytsenko","19":"tag-position","20":"tag-siversk","21":"tag-soldier","22":"tag-ukraine","23":"tag-vehicle","24":"tag-video"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114963417948793352","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/placeholder.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n