09-07-2025
Why Ukraine's newest weapons offer a glimpse of the future of war
Oleksiy has peered into the future of war.
'For those unlucky bastards who serve in the trenches, life is already hell,' said the mustachioed soldier who goes by the call sign 'Mexican'. 'But it's about to get a lot worse.'
The former fintech worker from Kyiv has just returned from four days of training in Lviv where he learnt how to use drones equipped with artificial intelligence.
If warfare's first technological revolution was gunpowder and its second the nuclear bomb, then autonomous weaponry is the third. On the battlefields of Ukraine, that revolution has already arrived.
Although neither Ukraine nor Russia is thought to have yet achieved reliable full autonomy — the stage at which a robot is capable of choosing and attacking someone or something by itself — both sides are moving rapidly towards that goal, already deploying partially autonomous systems.
The drones that Oleksiy was trained to use last week, for example, do not need operator like him to pilot them manually through a first-person view headset.
Now back at his unit's position near Kharkiv, he demonstrated to The Times how, by using an iPad, he simply has to drop a pin on a map and the drone will find its way there, like a general deploying their troops.
The advantage of this is that the absence of radio communication between operator and machine — normally required when piloting manually — means the drone becomes almost impossible for the enemy to detect and intercept. The technology also enables him to send up to 20 drones at once to converge on the same location.
Once they have reached it, most likely hovering a few hundred metres above a Russian vehicle or dugout, Oleksiy can take over the controls and pilot the kamikaze drones one by one towards their target.
'The enemy will now have only their eyes and ears to know whether there is a drone incoming, and by then it'll probably be too late for them anyway,' Oleksiy, 31, said as he sat surrounded by boxes of newly delivered drone parts.
Self-navigating drones are not the only AI systems that Ukrainian forces are experimenting with. More established — albeit only slightly — is the use of terminal guidance drones, which the 58th brigade have been using since the spring.
With these, an operator has to fly the drone to the enemy position, but once within eyeline of the target it can lock on through the cross-hairs of the first-person camera view and autonomously speed towards the enemy.
This is especially useful in cases where the target is moving, in difficult terrain or ring-fenced by heavy radio-electronic defence waves that cut the live video feed that the operator sees.
Last month, it saved the lives of an infantry unit that found itself in the path of 14 Russian armoured personnel carriers. Having tried and failed to destroy the column using conventional drones, it was the AI-powered ones that were able to penetrate their radio-electronic shield.
'We don't have a lot of these [terminal guidance] drones, so when we do use them we use them as a last resort, when we really need them — and this was one of those instances,' said Andriy, 32, a sergeant in the brigade.
He estimates that only one in 20 of the drones at his disposal are AI-enabled, all of which were bought with donations rather than supplied by the general staff. As is often a theme in this war, the Russians have more, he says.
But that will not necessarily always be the case because the AI arms race, unlike some of the past, is primarily one of software rather than hardware.
While Russia, with its superior military-industrial production line, may be able to churn out more shells, guns and men each month, its AI capability is only as strong as its programmers. In this, the two sides are far closer to parity.
There are dozens of Ukrainian companies working on various forms of autonomous military tech, including drones for deep strikes and unmanned land vehicles equipped with a machine gun turret.
Though there needs to be a physical machine that hosts the AI, once these are built new software capabilities can be instantly and repeatedly uploaded onto their computers — it could be applied, for example, to a missile or a tank.
'You have a completely new situation on the battlefield where the capabilities of a side can change dramatically overnight,' said Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder and chief executive of The Fourth Law, which supplies many of the terminal guidance drones used by Ukrainian forces. 'It wouldn't be possible in any war of the past. You can't find a legion of Roman soldiers just like that.'
The prospect of a future in which thinking but unfeeling machines are able to kill and destroy at will has inevitably provoked unease.
At a UN meeting in May, António Guterres, the secretary-general, called for an international ban on lethal autonomous systems, which he described as 'morally repugnant'.
The meeting was convened in New York after a resolution of the general assembly, but failed to agree on a ban: 166 countries had voted in favour of holding the meeting; Russia, Belarus and North Korea voted against; Ukraine abstained.
But those on the front lines have little time to mull the moral implications. As far as they are concerned, this is a weapon that is helping them to eliminate the enemy more effectively.
Where it all will lead is, for now, unimportant to them. But Oleksiy concedes the future could be stranger than science fiction. 'But who knows, perhaps in a year's time this might all look like something out of The Terminator,' he said.
Additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir
