• Science and Technology
• Russia
• Europe
• Ukraine
• Jack Detsch

Ukraine’s military will be deploying robots to fight against Russia within the next year, part of a strategy to deal with a shortage of readily available human combat troops, the country’s defense industry czar said.  

Ukraine’s strategic industries minister, Oleksandr Kamyshin, was in Washington last week to help the country’s state defense company open an office in the United States and to work on a number of joint ventures, including a deal with Northrop Grumman to produce medium-caliber ammunition in Ukraine. 

“This year will be the year of land systems as well, unmanned land systems,” Kamyshin said at the opening of the defense office. “We’ll see more of them on the front line. That’s one of the game-changers we expect in the nearest 12 months.” 

The point, Kamyshin said, is to get more troops off the front lines. “That’s the main philosophy,” he said. “We count people, and we want our people to be as far from the front line as we can.” 

Kamyshin said most of the robots will be produced in Ukraine, not with Western partners, and expects Ukrainian troops to use the machines for all types of missions, including ground combat and medical evacuation. He said in a follow-up interview that the deployment of ground robots to save human lives is a contrast to Russia’s military strategy. “They save machinery. They save everything. But they send people,” he said. 

There are about 250 defense start-ups building unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, across Ukraine, The Associated Press reported this week—many of them in secret to hide from Russian bombs. Ukraine’s government-funded Brave1 platform has already tested more than 50 ground systems, and Kyiv is expected to buy hundreds of them in the coming months. 

Ukraine has also certified at least 67 models of domestically built unmanned aerial vehicles, the vast majority of which the country’s defense ministry has contracted to buy. Kamyshin said Ukraine will produce millions of first-person-view drones, tens of thousands of midrange strike drones, and thousands of long-range strike drones this year.

Ukraine is not the only country that is thinking about deploying machines in battle to deal with a shortage of human troops. There are challenges when it comes to the availability of ground forces throughout Europe, too—one of the major things that has held back the implementation of new NATO war plans to deter Russia. 

The U.S. Army is considering adding a platoon of robots to fight within tank-backed infantry units, with the stated goal of not shedding human blood in the first exchange with an adversary such as Russia or China. Retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that a third of the U.S. military could be robotic within the next 10 to 15 years. 

The difficulty is doing it without slowing down troops as they move forward and giving units more things to maintain and a heavier logistical tail. The technology is still maturing. UGVs have limited battery capacity and can be rendered mostly useless by a damaged sensor, which they rely on to make judgments. 

But experts believe the tactical payoff for fielding UGVs at scale could be enormous. “If you are advancing through a breach, and you have concealed enemy firing posts, there is a high probability they would knock out your tanks,” Jack Watling, the senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, said in an interview in March. “If the UGVs go first but the tanks are behind them, the enemy may be detected by the UGVs—they may be killed by the UGVs if they don’t destroy them. But if they destroy them, they will reveal their position and be destroyed by the tanks.”

Because the battlefield has become a laboratory of innovation, Ukraine is further along than most nations when it comes to developing robots. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has already said the country will create a separate service branch for drones and unmanned vehicles. 

“It’s impossible for us to overrun Russia [in production],” said Vlad Muzylov, a diplomat at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington. “It’s just impossible.” But, he added, Ukraine could level up the technology in its arsenal “to defeat them not in quantity but in quality.”

Still, with Western officials eyeing another window for a Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2025, Ukraine will also need more troops. 

“If you look at what both sides are doing now, they need more people,” Royal Netherlands Navy Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee, told Foreign Policy in an interview on the sidelines of last week’s NATO summit. “We are not recruiting for Ukraine. They are recruiting for themselves. They have to solve that issue in terms of finding enough soldiers.”

A Baltic diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Western training needed to improve to help Ukrainians fight in combined groups on the battalion level, about 250 to 500 troops in their military, according to U.S. Defense Department estimates. Zelensky has already lowered Ukraine’s conscription age from 27 to 25, but Western officials have urged Ukraine to tap into the country’s 18-to-24 population to fuel next year’s push. And the trainings, which last only about eight to 12 weeks, need to go on longer, the official said, to make Ukrainian troops more effective. 

The Ukrainian military will also need to be trained on effectively integrating ground robots, too. 

“Last year was the year of the big challenge to produce enough. This year is the year of coordination, integration, and program management,” Kamyshin said. “It’s all about training people, coordinating, and integrating.”