Drones took both his feet. After 491 days in a concrete pipe, a drone carried him out

A Ukrainian soldier held a front-line position inside a concrete drainage pipe for 491 days, lost both feet there, cut one of them off himself with a knife, and was then flown out hanging underneath a drone.

His name is Kostiantyn Vlasenko. He is 49, a volunteer from the mining city of Kryvyi Rih, and he serves with Ukraine's 30th Separate Mechanized Brigade. His callsign is Magura. The position was called Vertun, on the left bank of the Oskil River, in the Kupiansk sector of the Kharkiv region.

Russian drones are what took his legs. A Ukrainian drone is what carried him home. The weapon became the ambulance.

The account was published on 20 October 2026 by the Ukrainian defence outlet Militarnyi, drawn from an interview by the journalist Yuri Butusov, and by United24 Media the same day. Video of the flight spread fast online over that weekend.

What happened across the 491 days?

No English-language outlet has put the whole sequence in one place. Here it is, with the outlet that reported each step.

Note: Accounts do not line up on every detail. Some reports date the flight to 4 October, Korabelov.info to 20 October. United24 Media put the carry at 18 kilometres, while The New Voice of Ukraine gives a total flight of 62 kilometres. Militarnyi's "about ten months" with a second soldier is a few weeks longer than a straight count back from October allows.

How do you live inside a concrete drainage pipe?

The position was a drainage pipe with a hole knocked through the middle of it. That hole was the door. Militarnyi describes the men setting up a shelter inside the concrete.

Photo: Brendanboshea / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

When the position was later destroyed, he crawled under the cast-iron grate of a wrecked stove in the ruins of an abandoned school and stayed there. Comrades kept him alive from the air. Food came down by drone. So did water, bandages, antibiotics and painkillers.

He took the painkillers for about a month to six weeks, Korabelov.info reports, then stopped.

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A Spanish climber made world news for spending 500 days by herself in a cave. She had food, light and a team overhead. Vlasenko had about eight months alone, with Russian positions around him.

Why did he cut off his own foot with a knife?

Because nobody could reach him, and the leg was already gone.

Russian munitions destroyed his right leg in April, Korabelov.info reports. He laid what was left of it on a brick. He took a knife. He cut. He told Butusov that tears were running down his face while he did it.

Then he put on a tourniquet, waited for the bleeding to slow, made a bandage and took the tourniquet off.

His left foot he did not have to cut. In May the tissue died and the foot came away on its own, according to United24 Media. By early summer he had no feet at all, and he was still at the position.

What did the Russians offer him over a loudspeaker?

They knew exactly where he was.

Russian troops tried to talk him into surrendering, Militarnyi and United24 Media report. At one point they dropped a speaker near his position and played messages at him, promising he would be evacuated and treated if he gave himself up.

Photo: Nadiya Li / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

He refused, and stayed in the pipe with no feet for months after that, resupplied by small drones.

How does a drone carry a grown man 62 kilometres?

With six motors and a cargo winch.

The aircraft was a Heavy Shot Ayudag-6, a hexacopter built by the Ukrainian firm Gurzuf Defence. It is normally a bomber. The company supplied it for the mission at no charge, United24 Media reports.

Photo: Игоревич / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

On the day it lifted 135 kilograms, which The New Voice of Ukraine reports as a Ukrainian record for a drone of this class. The flight ran for more than an hour and covered 62 kilometres, with Vlasenko slung underneath.

Getting it there took a small war of its own. Crews from the 92nd Assault Brigade, the 30th and 14th Mechanized Brigades and the 10th Army Corps worked the mission together. Electronic warfare units jammed Russian signals. Other drones flew decoy routes. Ukrainian guns fired on Russian positions to keep heads down while the hexacopter crossed the river.

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Ukraine has spent two years turning cheap aircraft into weapons that reach data centres deep inside Russia. This was the same technology pointed the other way.

The pilot who flew him out is from Kryvyi Rih, the same city Vlasenko volunteered from.

Is Kostiantyn Vlasenko alive, and where is he now?

He is alive.

United24 Media published a photograph of him recovering in hospital after the evacuation. Korabelov.info reports he is being treated in Kharkiv, where the head of the hospital, Volodymyr Kupriianchuk, said there were no serious complications such as suppuration or gangrene. He credits the antibiotics that were dropped to Vlasenko by drone, month after month, while he lay under the stove grate.

Prosthetic fitting and rehabilitation come next.

Militarnyi's write-up does not state his condition, which is why early reports online disagreed about whether he survived. Two named outlets now say plainly that he did.

What did the rescue sound like from the bottom of the ruins?

He heard it before he saw it.

It sounded like a helicopter landing, he told reporters, a loud and deep rumble coming down through the rubble. He called it the hum of rescue, in the translation published by Around Prague, and said the sound will stay with him for the rest of his life.

For 491 days, the noise of propellers over that pipe meant somebody was trying to kill him. On the last day it meant the opposite.

Asked about being the first soldier in the war lifted out by drone, Vlasenko did not want the title. He said he does not like being first. He would rather be second.