Kharkiv, Ukraine

In a bunker on the outskirts of Kharkiv, a group of rookie Ukrainian soldiers are learning the basics of combat medicine.  The temperature outside is minus 20C, and clouds of breath hang in the air – as does the gravity of what they are letting themselves in for. The dummies used for training have fake bullet holes and missing limbs, and during a quiz at the end of the lesson, gruesome scenarios are playing out.

‘If you tie a tourniquet, but there’s still bleeding, what do you do?’

‘What is the significance of cerebral fluid in the mouth or ears?’

Most of these medics will not even be right on the frontline’s ‘red zone’. Instead they work in field clinics a few miles further back, where troops drop off injured soldiers for immediate triage.  This is the so-called ‘yellow zone’ – not that it is much safer these days. Thanks to the armed drones that now stalk the frontlines, hovering and swooping like birds of prey, even the rearward echelons are perilous.

‘Today you can be in danger from drones anywhere up to about 25 miles back,’ says Daniel Ridley, a former British soldier who runs the training course, a private scheme called the Trident Defence Initiative. ‘That makes the task of evacuating casualties far more hazardous.’

Ridley now refers to the yellow zone as the ‘grey zone’, a nod to how drone warfare has transformed the battlefield. When the Russians first invaded, the fighting was like the first world war – the sides shelled each other relentlessly and fought close-quarters battles when capturing trenches.

Today, by contrast, drones makes it perilous to even pop out of a fox hole for a smoke. Soldiers’ bodies lie rotting in no-man’s land because it is too risky to retrieve them.  Some troops talk almost nostalgically of the war’s early days, when all they........

© The Spectator