Serhiy Melnyk takes a tiny rusty fragment, carefully wrapped in paper, out of his pocket.
He raises it. “It pierced my lung, grazed my kidney, and my heart,” the Ukrainian soldier adds softly.
When he was battling in eastern Ukraine, shrapnel from a Russian drone lodged in his heart, leaving behind traces of dried blood.
“I didn’t even realise what it was at first — I thought I was just short of breath under my body armour,” he recalls. “They had to extract shrapnel out of my heart.”
These injuries are growing more frequent in Ukraine as drone warfare increases. Drones frequently carry materials and armaments that can fragment and result in more complicated shrapnel wounds.
