A weapon is mounted on the Lehit ground robotic system, developed by specialists of the International Legion under the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, during a demonstration in Ukraine on December 9, 2025.
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Across Ukraine’s front line, soldiers are staying behind while machines go forward. Ground robots are hauling ammunition, evacuating wounded troops, laying mines, and increasingly carrying weapons into combat as Ukraine tries to replace as many frontline tasks as possible with machines.
The effort is accelerating rapidly. In April, President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered the military to field at least 50,000 unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in 2026, calling them “the next big step” in saving soldiers’ lives. Ukraine’s UGV industry is expanding just as quickly. A study by the KSE Institute, Brave1 and Defense Builder, found Ukraine’s UGV market grew 488% in 2025.
Ihor Shmyryov, head of the UGV department at Ukraine’s defense innovation platform Brave1, expects Ukraine to exceed Zelensky’s target once direct brigade purchases are included. “In the first half of 2026, 25,000 UGVs will be contracted for deployment to the front,” he told me. “That’s twice the number contracted during all of 2025.”
In March, Andrii Biletsky, commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, said UGVs could eventually replace up to one-third of soldiers along the front line by taking over logistics and combat tasks.
“The goal is to replace an infantryman on the front line with drones, as much as possible,” Shmyryov said. That means pairing aerial drones with UGVs.
That transformation is already underway. In April alone, Shmyryov said Ukrainian UGVs carried out more than 10,000 missions, most delivering supplies to frontline positions. Casualty evacuation has also become common, although such missions require careful planning under fire.
Persistent drone surveillance has made even routine movements to the front dangerous. Ground robots can resupply frontline positions or evacuate casualties without exposing another crew to drone attack. The more dangerous the battlefield becomes, the greater the demand for machines that can take soldiers’ place.
“Drones can make ground unlivable,” Heiner Philipp, an engineer with Technology United for Ukraine, told me. Ukrainian forces can now detect and strike Russian troops day and night, often suppressing positions before infantry move in. Increasingly, the first thing advancing across that ground is not a soldier, but a robot.
That shift is already visible at the front. Pavel Shurmei of the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment told me his unit initially experimented with machine-gun-equipped UGVs but now uses them mainly for logistics, where the systems have found their clearest battlefield role.
From Logistics To Combat
One emerging mission is countering Russia’s growing use of small infiltration groups, allowing armed UGVs to engage them without exposing more soldiers inside the drone kill zone.
“Primarily, it involves engaging enemy personnel and equipment using turrets. This is already operational on the front lines,” Shmyryov said. “Robots can perform patrols and hold positions.”
That evolution is already visible. In February, Khartiia’s Lava regiment cleared a Russian strongpoint near Kupiansk using ground robots, kamikaze UGVs and strike drones without sending infantry into the objective. The operation underscored a broader shift from using UGVs as engineering tools to integrating them into combined-arms assaults.
Two months later, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry announced the formation of “drone assault units,” integrating aerial drones, ground robots and infantry into a single combined-arms system.
Developers are already experimenting with new battlefield roles for UGVs. Ratel Robotics began testing net launchers mounted on ground robots to intercept low-flying drones. In June, the 3rd Army Corps unveiled an AI-enabled robotic air-defense system capable of autonomously detecting, tracking and engaging aerial targets, highlighting how rapidly UGVs are evolving into modular battlefield platforms.
Communications remain one of the biggest obstacles to deploying ground robots at scale.
Rather than relying on a single radio link between an operator and a robot, mesh networks allow drones, UGVs and ground stations to relay commands through one another, making robotic formations more resilient to jamming and obstacles on the battlefield. “Mesh networking is essentially a prerequisite for UGV employment at scale,” Ryan O’Leary, a former commander of Ukraine’s Chosen Company volunteer unit, told me.
Russia is pursuing many of the same concepts. Samuel Bendett, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said Russian forces are fielding UGVs for logistics, casualty evacuation and combat roles, including systems such as the Courier, Depesha and Impuls, alongside improvised robots built by frontline units.
But he believes Ukraine currently retains an advantage in deployment. “The overall Russian UGV number used at the front today is likely smaller than the Ukrainian one,” Bendett told me, adding that communications limitations have constrained wider Russian use. Even so, he said, both militaries increasingly recognize that ground robots are becoming essential on a battlefield dominated by persistent surveillance and strike drones.
Building A New Combined-Arms Doctrine
The question is no longer whether ground robots can fight, but how to build operations around them. Ukraine’s military commanders are beginning to plan assaults around what robots can accomplish before soldiers move forward.
The commander of the NC13 strike UGV company in the 3rd Assault Brigade told the Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi in December that his unit has already conducted offensive operations using multiple armed robots simultaneously. The next step, he said, is making such assaults routine rather than exceptional.
The growing capabilities do not mean infantry is disappearing. “UGVs can support frontal assaults and degrade enemy forces,” George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War told me. “They are not a perfect substitute for infantry. At the end of the day there will always be a requirement for old-fashioned infantry to occupy and control terrain.” He added that current systems remain vulnerable to FPV drones and mines, and armed UGVs must still be physically reloaded after expending their ammunition.
“Progress here depends as much on hardware as software,” Deborah Fairlamb, founding partner of Ukraine-focused venture capital firm Green Flag Ventures, told me. Advances in software and AI should make UGVs more capable as better hardware reaches the battlefield.
Ukrainian commanders now view robots as expendable battlefield assets. During casualty evacuations, multiple robots may be lost attempting to recover a wounded soldier before one succeeds. As Yuliia Trybushna of NUMO Robotics told me: “It’s better to lose four machines than one soldier.”
Ukraine plans to field more than 50,000 UGVs this year. But Trybushna estimates replacing most frontline positions would ultimately require roughly 150,000 to 200,000 annually. Combat UGVs remain relatively uncommon not because they have failed, she said, but because the doctrine needed to employ them at scale is still being developed. Individual battlefield successes come first; standardized tactics follow.
The next step is turning battlefield successes into standardized systems that every brigade can field.
Ground robots are unlikely to replace infantry anytime soon. But they are steadily replacing many of the tasks soldiers once performed, offering an early glimpse of a battlefield where soldiers increasingly stay behind while machines go forward.