The First Separate Medical Battalion finally published real numbers on the Maul ground robot, and they are worth reading carefully. Medical evacuation means getting the wounded out while the enemy hunts anything that moves.
The Numbers Behind the Maul
By late September 2026 the unit ran hundreds of missions. Success rate: 51.9%. That means the wounded soldier was pulled out and handed to the next evacuation stage. The rest split evenly: 24.05% returned without the wounded, and 24.05% were lost before loading.
In 4.6% of all missions the robot was destroyed with a wounded soldier on board. The failure breakdown is the war in miniature. Excessive enemy activity caused 51.5% of failed missions. FPV drone hits accounted for 44.1%. The Muscovian medical doctrine: finish the wounded, kill the evacuation, make the cost of saving a life unbearable.
One Maul averages 1.92 evacuated soldiers over its service life. Some survive twenty minutes. One lasted twelve successful missions. The maximum recorded mission distance was 110 kilometers, with typical speed around 30 to 40 km/h.
Why the Maul Exists
The injury data explains why this matters. Shrapnel wounds: 93.2%. Severe injuries: 34.2%. These are artillery and drone war casualties. Every minute spent waiting for a human stretcher team is a minute closer to death.
The Maul is a quad bike with an armored capsule, internal combustion engine, and electronic warfare gear, a Ukrainian answer to a specific problem: how to move a bleeding soldier across ground covered by FPV drones without adding another casualty.
The 51.9% number will be used by critics to claim the system does not work. You're reading it wrong.
The alternative could still fail. The alternative is no evacuation attempt at all, or a human team taking the same FPV hit. Every successful mission is a soldier who would otherwise be dead or captured.
Adaptation Under Fire
The real story is adaptation under fire. The battalion prioritizes missions by injury severity, threat level, and logistics. More than ten soldiers support each operation. They check the robot before every run.
They are learning which routes work, which weather kills the mission, and how to coordinate with adjacent units. Ukrainian military innovation works like this. Not through press releases, but through units publishing their own failure rates and adjusting.
Studying this data matters because no NATO army has run hundreds of robotic medical evacuations under continuous FPV and artillery threat. The Maul remains unfinished. A live experiment in saving lives inside a kill zone has now made its data public. That transparency is itself a weapon.