Ukraine has a robot problem — or rather, it is building one on purpose. Across active frontlines, armed unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) are now a regular feature of the war: machine gun-equipped platforms defending positions, kamikaze ground drones silently destroying enemy hideouts, and AI-assisted systems doing the reconnaissance that would previously have cost a soldier their life.

The Silent Kill Zone

What distinguishes ground drones from their aerial counterparts is the absence of warning. Aerial drones buzz — you can hear them incoming. A battery-powered kamikaze UGV makes no sound at all. Ukrainian battalions have been deploying explosive-laden ground vehicles to blow up Russian positions and personnel carriers with no auditory warning, a tactical advantage that is difficult to overstate in close-quarters combat.

The deputy commander of the 33rd Detached Mechanised Brigade's tank battalion, who goes by the callsign Afghan, described one armed UGV ambushing a Russian personnel carrier, and another defending a Ukrainian position for weeks. But he was equally candid about the limits: most UGVs currently on the battlefield are part-autonomous at best. They can navigate and detect, but the decision to open fire remains with a human operator.

"Robots can misidentify the wrong person or attack a civilian. That's why the final decision must be made by an operator," Afghan explained. Those constraints are partly ethical, partly legal — international humanitarian law requires human accountability for lethal force.

The Numbers Are Climbing

The scale of deployment is growing rapidly. Ukrainian UGV manufacturer Tencore produced more than 2,000 vehicles for the army in 2025. Its director expects demand to jump to around 40,000 units in 2026, with 10-15% armed with weapons. That is an order-of-magnitude shift in one year.

The driving force is grim arithmetic. Drones have expanded the Ukrainian kill zone — the area too dangerous for human infantry — to 20-25km from the line of contact. That zone cannot be unmanned, so it is being robotised. "Ukraine can afford to lose robots, but it simply cannot afford to lose battle-ready soldiers," said Major Afanasiev bluntly.

Russia is developing its own combat UGVs in parallel. The Kuryer can be equipped with a flame-thrower or heavy machine gun and run autonomously for five hours. The Lyagushka ("Frog") kamikaze vehicle is already being used to blow up Ukrainian positions. Both sides are racing toward the same endpoint.

The Horizon: Swarms and Robot-vs-Robot Combat

Ukraine's former commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi — now ambassador to the UK — described the near future at Chatham House: "In the near future we'll see dozens and even hundreds of smarter and cheaper drones attack from various directions and heights, from the air, ground and sea at the same time." AI-powered swarms, coordinated across domains.

Devdroid CEO Yuriy Poritsky, whose company produced hundreds of strike droids for the military in 2025, put it plainly: "Sooner or later, we'll end up in a situation where our strike UGV will come up against their strike UGV on the battlefield. Robot wars may sound like science fiction, but there's nothing sci-fi about the battlefield. It's our reality."

His company is already working on autonomous return-to-base capability for when communications are lost — the first step toward fully autonomous tactical systems. The ethical and legal questions around where human oversight ends and machine autonomy begins are not being resolved before deployment. They are being answered on the ground, in real time, under fire.

Source: BBC News