Kyiv: Serhii Melnyk pulls a bloodstained metal shard from his pocket, wrapped loosely in worn paper. It is rusted, dull and rough around the edges.
He holds it up to the light. This sliced my kidney. Almost reached my lungs. Came close to the heart, he says, with his eyes steady.
The fragment tore into his body while he was fighting in eastern Ukraine. It came from a Russian drone blast one of the many that now rain shrapnel across the war zone.
At first, Serhii did not notice. He kept fighting and thought the tightness in his chest was his flak jacket. Later, he could not breathe. Surgeons performed a surgery on him and pulled this out.
Drone warfare has changed everything. Bombs are not the only threat anymore. It is the tiny pieces hot metal, jagged and flying like knives that kill slowly or suddenly.
Military doctors in Ukraine say these fragments are now behind 80% of battlefield injuries. If Serhii had not been treated quickly, he would not have made it. This was like a blade. They told me I was lucky, he says.
But luck had help. It came in the shape of a pen-sized device with a magnetic tip. It is called the magnetic extractor.
A Small Tool, A Silent Revolution
Cardiac surgeon Serhii Maksymenko keeps footage of that surgery. In the video, a magnet pulls the metal fragment out of a still-beating heart. No large cuts. No mess.
I made a small incision. Just enough for the magnet to slide in and grab it, he says.
His team has performed 70 such operations in one year alone. The device has changed everything from battlefield trauma to survival odds. Earlier, extracting fragments meant complex surgeries larger wounds, more blood loss and higher risk.
But soldiers did not have time. Field doctors did not have the resources. The war needed faster solutions. That is when a former lawyer stepped in.
The Man Behind the Magnet
Oleh Baikov spent years volunteering for Ukraines military. He was not a doctor, but he listened. Frontline medics told him what they needed something fast, precise and portable. Something to find and remove deadly fragments lodged inside soldiers.
He worked with engineers, spoke to field doctors and tested prototypes. Together, they built the magnetic extractor. The idea was not new. Magnets were used in surgeries as far back as the Crimean War. But this version was different smaller, sharper and smarter.
For abdominal injuries, they made flexible models. For bones, they reinforced the tool with stronger alloys. For narrow wounds, they crafted micro-variants.
Oleh carries one with him. It looks like a stylus. But it can lift a hammer. Doctors now use it like a wand, sweeping it gently over wounds. Once a fragment sticks, they make a tiny cut. In seconds, it is out.
Former military surgeon Dr David Nott calls it genius. Wars force people to invent what peace never demands, he says.
The Needle in the Battlefield
In war, speed matters and so does simplicity. Fragments are nearly invisible to the naked eye. Searching for them inside a wounded soldier is like chasing a shadow.
Finding them is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Often, it delays treatment for everyone else, he says.
And when the search involves large incisions, blood loss rises and so does the risk of infection. This tool makes it faster, cleaner and safer, he adds.
Across Ukraine, it is now standard in frontline medical kits. Doctors like Andrii Elban work under shellfire, in bunkers, in makeshift clinics and sometimes without anesthesia. He has received 3,000 of these extractors for teams like his.
My job is to stop bleeding, close wounds and pull soldiers back to life, he says.
No Papers, Just Results
The device is not certified by Ukraines health authorities. It did not go through formal trials. It could not. In war, bureaucracy waits. Soldiers cant. The Health Ministry admits it has not cleared the extractor for regular use. But in emergency zones, the rules bend. Under martial law, the battlefield decides what counts.
Oleh knows the risk.
If this is a crime, he laughs, I will take the blame. Jail me, but jail the doctors too. They are saving lives with it every day.
Dr Nott agrees, saying, Certifications can wait but survival cannot.
He believes the tool could work in other war zones too like Gaza or Sudan. In war, you do what keeps people alive. That is it, he says.
A Soldier Comes Home
In Lviv, Serhiis wife Yuliia holds the metal piece in her hand. Her eyes fill. This thing almost killed him. And now it sits on our shelf, she whispers.
She pauses. I do not know who made that magnet. But I thank them with everything I have. Because of them, my husband came back, she says.
Sometimes, miracles do not wear capes. They hide in a surgeons hand or rest in a soldiers shirt pocket cold, sharp, rusted and quietly defeated.