A heavy-lift drone carries the 40 kg electric bike toward the stranded soldier, “Tanker.” (Image Source: X)
Amid the ruins and relentless crossfire near Position 360, an injured Ukrainian soldier found himself pinned down, outnumbered, and out of options, until an unlikely hero arrived in the form of a drone carrying a 40kg electric bicycle.
The soldier, known by his call sign “Tanker,” had been defending a forward trench near Siversk for five straight days. Being exhausted, wounded, and surrounded by Russian forces made a foot retreat not only unlikely but also a suicide attempt.
What followed was a rescue operation that defied both odds and convention.
“My leg was gone. My rifle was nearly fused to my hand. Still, I waited,” Tanker recalled in a voice message released by Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion, the Rubizh Brigade. "Our drones hovered above. Then came the fire."
Tanker says Russian forces tossed gas cylinders and lit them ablaze, attempting to flush him out. His post, already under siege, briefly turned into an inferno.
According to Mykola Hrytsenko, the brigade’s chief of staff, conventional ground rescue was deemed too dangerous. “The enemy had us boxed in from all directions,” Hrytsenko explained. “A soldier cannot run 6–7 kilometers wounded, through sniper zones and minefields. We had to rethink everything.”
This reconsideration became a daring experiment that would eventually garner international attention. An electric bicycle weighing forty kilograms was connected to a military drone that is usually used for surveillance drops by the Rubizh team. First Attempt: Killed in midair. Second Attempt: The drone crashed due to overheating. Attempt Three: Achievement.
The footage released by the brigade shows a moment of surreal courage: a drone descending like a slow-motion miracle, lowering the e-bike to Tanker’s bunker.
“As soon as I mounted it, I didn’t look back,” he later said. “I just rode.”
The incident has since become symbolic of the Ukrainian forces’ increasingly unconventional battlefield tactics, driven by necessity and lack of logistics.
“Delivery drones aren’t just for medicines anymore,” said a Ukrainian defense analyst who requested anonymity. “In some areas, they are the only link between life and death.”
E-bikes, often dismissed in civilian life as hipster luxuries, are quietly becoming warfront essentials—stealthy, fast, and ideal for escape under radar or fire.
The dramatic escape unfolded just hours before Russian missile strikes battered the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, killing at least 16 civilians. Among the victims: a six-year-old boy and his mother, whose apartment was torn apart in the pre-dawn assault.
While Tanker’s ride to survival offers a glimmer of hope and ingenuity, Ukraine’s war-weary population continues to pay a heavy price, often far from the front lines.
The tale of “Tanker” isn’t just a battlefield anecdote—it’s a case study in human resolve meeting battlefield innovation. In a war defined by attrition and unpredictability, sometimes survival rides in on spinning blades and a lithium charge.
