These killing machines swerve explosions, rain machinegun fire and save manpower in the fight against Putin. We witnessed their first platoon-scale assault
Maxim Tucker
February 9, 2025
The Times
A small robot rolls through the village ruins, heavy machinegun protruding from its turret. Its little wheels bounce comically over the frozen, rutted soil, but its intent is lethal. A few hundred metres away, another robot advances alongside a parallel path, then another and another — more than five in total.
As they close in on a Russian infantry position across an open field in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, they take turns to fire, dodging explosions that would easily wound a human soldier. A few kilometres behind them, soldiers from the land robotics platoon of Ukraine’s 13th “Khartiia” National Guard Brigade use joysticks to push their machines towards the fortified trench line. Through video from a drone high above, a commander watches a human vs robot battle of the sort once confined to science fiction:
This is the first time, the brigade says, that Ukraine has launched an assault with a platoon-sized force of robots against the Russians. It is a vision of the future of warfare, one that Ukraine is working to bring to the present day. By doing so, commanders hope to save their soldiers’ lives, gain an edge over the Russians and solve persistent manpower problems. “Our robots help us to reduce the number of people we need in combat,” says second lieutenant “Mathematician”, the head of the Khartiia brigade’s ground and air unmanned systems. He is a PhD student who has had to pause his academic career to find innovative ways to kill the invading Russians.
The Khartiia platoon is working with the armed forces of a Baltic country renowned for its digital savvy to develop better operating systems, Mathematician says. The world’s giant arms manufacturers, such as BAE Systems and Rheinmetall, are also watching these developments closely — both have opened facilities in Ukraine.
The platoon still has several logistical issues to work through. The wheels can stick in uneven terrain and the sheer number of drones, operating on various radio frequencies and mostly in the air, means their signals are often interfering with each other. There is Russian jamming too. However, these are problems Ukrainian manufacturers are working to overcome.
At a small factory in Kyiv, engineers from the robotics company Legit are developing next-generation platforms, taking lessons from the battlefield by the special operations teams of Ukraine’s military intelligence, the HUR, which they provide platforms for. “Sometimes they shoot tanks or some large vehicles, sometimes they use it in urban combat to destroy buildings,” says Volodymyr Kushnir, Legit’s head technician. “Last time, they laid explosives that destroyed a building with thirty Russian soldiers in it.”
Legit has a range of models it wants to build at scale, including one with two anti-tank grenade launchers for attacking enemy armour. The tracks and turrets are separate modules, so the same base can be used for different tasks. It also means a robot can keep fighting if the base is damaged, or the base can return to its lines if the turret is damaged.
The tracks on their newest platform have sophisticated suspension, modelled on tanks, to allow accurate fire on the move. They use satellite internet rather than radio frequencies to reduce the chances of interference and can accommodate AI that would allow them to continue fighting even if they were cut off from command.
Oleksandr Kamyshin, President Zelenksy’s former minister for strategic industries and now a close adviser, believes that Ukraine will be able to field a robot army by the end of the year. “We’ve been pioneering not only air and sea unmanned systems but also land systems. We tested them extensively last year,” he said.
Ukraine’s aerial kamikaze drones have inflicted terrible damage on the Russians, now estimated to have suffered 700,000 casualties while spending $200 billion on their war effort. Yet Zelensky’s vastly outnumbered infantry have struggled to hold territory.
The needs of the battlefield are accelerating technological development, yet much of the progress on land drones is still being made by small companies, like Legit, who have honed their technology using the battlefield experience of their close personal connections.
To expand and win big government tenders, they must overcome Ukraine’s complicated bureaucracy and a competitive and sometimes corrupt market. Legit’s business has already been raided by rivals and one of its founders, a special operations soldier, is under house arrest, accused of profiting from selling products to the military he says he produced at a loss and possessing the explosives he is manufacturing for them. Legit’s engineers are also mobilised and sent to the front, despite their specialist expertise, Kushnir said.
Ukraine’s infantry, who take the heaviest casualties of all its armed forces, are desperate for more robots on the battlefield. Inevitably the Russians will copy these ideas and combat will more often be robot on robot.
For now Khartiia’s robot attacks still require infantry follow-up. While the machinegun robots kept the Russians’ heads down, another approached their dugout with anti-tank mines, dropping two inside the trench line, then withdrawing before an explosion. The brigade’s infantry followed, suffering casualties as they approached.
Ukrainian troops had to retrieve two robots by hand because one was stuck in a rut and another ran out of power. Without mass production, each is expensive and would be of high value to the Russians, should they capture it.
By the end of the firefight, Khartiia had taken the trench, claiming some 30 Russian soldiers were killed. It was not possible to determine how many lives the robots took, but their attacks terrify the Russians, Mathematician says. “It’s just metal and machine shooting at you, hundreds of bullets, really precisely with AI,” he says. “I can’t imagine how I’d react if I was there.”
Maxim Tucker was Kyiv correspondent for The Times between 2014 and 2017 and is now an editor on the foreign desk. He has returned to report from the frontlines of the war in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. He advises on grantmaking in the former Soviet countries for the Open Society Foundations and prior to that was Amnesty International’s Campaigner on Ukraine and the South Caucasus. He has also written for The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, Newsweek and Politico.