In some parts of the Ukrainian front, the hardest task is getting there. Russian drones watch roads and attack anything that moves. Increasingly, however, the debris left behind demonstrates that the casualties are robots, not human-operated vehicles. Ukraine cannot afford to waste soldiers, so it sends machines first.
Roads to the fortress city of Kostyantynivka, for example, are littered with destroyed ground robots ambushed on supply runs. Ukraine’s counter-measures are also robotic; unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) equipped with machine guns are increasingly helping to pre-emptively destroy Russian drones lying in wait for Ukrainian vehicles.
This is starting to change the ground war. Ukraine’s aerial drones have already reshaped Moscow’s war of attrition, hunting vehicles, striking supply routes, and turning Russian assaults into one-way suicide missions, and at sea, its unmanned boats have bottled up or sunk the Black Sea Fleet.
Russian soldiers who manage to make it into a destroyed frontline village are often stranded in forward positions with little chance of resupply, except for the occasional drone. They are also quickly targeted by first-person-view (FPV) drones, or bomber drones that drop anti-tank mines.
But air power has limits. A Russian soldier hiding in a basement, dugout, or shattered building is not always easy to find or kill from the sky. Clearing their position usually means sending infantry, and that has meant Ukrainian soldiers still need to enter the kill zone.
Ukrainian drone teams can track and strike Russian defenders day and night, weakening positions before Ukrainian infantry moves in. And increasingly, the first thing to move forward is not a soldier, but a robot.
“A UGV armed with a machine gun is probably more intimidating than an infantryman in many situations,” said Obi, a soldier from Ukraine’s 3 Special Operations Regiment.
“Soldiers understand how to fight another human,” Obi added. “A machine advancing toward your position while pouring fire onto it creates both a physical and psychological effect.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has set a goal of producing at least 50,000 unmanned ground vehicles this year for logistics, evacuation, and combat missions, and Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said Ukrainian forces had carried out more than 7,000 UGV missions in April alone.
Yet manufacturers argue that demand may already exceed those targets. “When we calculated what would be required to replace most soldiers on frontline positions with robotic systems, we estimated that Ukraine would need approximately 150,000–200,000 UGVs annually under current wartime conditions,” said Yuliia Trybushna of NUMO Robotics.
“Robots can perform patrols and hold positions,” said Ihor Shmyryov, head of the UGV department at Brave1, which brings together Ukrainian defense innovators from the public and private sectors. “Combat robots are the next piece of the puzzle to replace people on the frontline with technologies, and we are moving towards this goal.”
Brigadier General Andriy Biletskyi, commander of 3 Army Corps, believes wider adoption of ground robots could reduce frontline infantry requirements by as much as 30% this year. Soldiers would still be needed, but increasingly for tasks that machines cannot perform, he said.
Greater UGV use and robot doctrine have been in the works for some time. In December 2024, Ukrainian forces were reported to have carried out one of the first assaults using only ground robots and drones, and in February, near Kupiansk, a Russian strongpoint was cleared using ground robots, kamikaze UGVs, and strike drones without a single Ukrainian soldier entering the battlefield.
In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry announced the deployment of “drone-assault units,” combining aerial drones, ground robots, and infantry into a single system. “Lives have been saved more than 22,000 times when a robot went into the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier,” it said.
In workshops across the frontline, Ukrainian soldiers are turning small tracked and wheeled platforms into fighting vehicles. They weld on mounts, add machine guns, attach rocket launchers or flamethrowers, and test whatever works to kill the enemy.
In December, the 3 Separate Assault Brigade, now part of Biletskyi’s 3 Army Corps, reported that a machine-gun-equipped UGV defended a key position for 45 days, supported by aerial drones providing surveillance. “It’s easier to control an area for 24 hours when you’re sitting in a safe zone 50km away,” said Oleh Fedoryshyn, head of research and design at DevDroid.
Dmytro, a Company Commander in 108 Territorial Defense Brigade, said ground systems have limitations. “Modern war cannot be won with robotic systems alone,” he said. “Where there is no Ukrainian infantry, the enemies will be, so we have to fight as a whole.”
Ground system manufacturers are proliferating. More than 280 Ukrainian companies are now developing ground robots, and production of such systems rose by 488% in 2025, but they are not cheap. DevDroid sells UGVs to the Ukrainian military for about $30,000, rising to around $50,000 when fitted with a Browning machine gun.
The pace is striking. Some companies, including Ratel Robotics, are turning UGVs into mobile launch points for fiber-optic FPV drones, allowing strikes from closer to the front without putting an operator at risk.
The pattern has been familiar throughout the war. Ukraine takes a battlefield problem, puts it to soldiers and small companies, and then tests the answer under fire. Some ideas fail quickly, others spread. Ukraine’s advantage has been rapid adaptation as the battlefield constantly evolves.
Ground robots that began by carrying supplies through drone-infested roads are increasingly being asked to shoot, explode, and draw fire as decoys.
While the infantryman is not disappearing from the battlefield, in more sections of the Ukrainian front, he is less and less likely to be the first going over the top.
David Kirichenko is a freelance journalist and an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He can be found on X/Twitter @DVKirichenko.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
