The robot Ukraine’s former defense minister wants to send to war would look at least somewhat human; at least, in function.
Mykhailo Fedorov, a 35-year-old politician and technology entrepreneur who previously oversaw Ukraine’s rapid expansion of battlefield drones as defense minister, is now trying to do something similar with terrestrial robots. His goal is to build relatively simple, humanoid machines that can perform jobs soldiers still have to do themselves: reload a machine gun, swap batteries in sensors, launch drones and operate in places where sending a person could be deadly. On the front line under constant 24/7 video surveillance, a soldier can be spotted and swiftly attacked with a drone in mere minutes, and that is not an exaggeration.
At the IT Arena technology conference in Lviv on Sept. 26, Fedorov called for a “new Manhattan Project” to accelerate military robotics. His new initiative, the Army of Robots, aims to bring engineers, startups, investors and military units together to develop such machines quickly enough to matter in the current war.
“Our idea is to combine engineers, startups and capital into one ecosystem so we can launch humanoid-like robots on the battlefield,” Fedorov told Defense News. “We want to eventually substitute our infantry with these robots.”
To be clear, Fedorov is not proposing anything like the fancy and polished general-purpose humanoids demonstrated by American and Chinese robotics companies. He says Ukraine needs simpler machines that can be manufactured cheaply, assigned a narrow set of battlefield tasks and produced in large numbers. In other words, we won’t see anything like in The Terminator anytime soon, at least not in Ukraine, but the concern is real that we’re heading in that direction.
To some of you reading about all this, the vision may sound a bit like a pipedream. After all, Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe. However, it would be a mistake to underestimate them, as Vladimir Putin and his army have painfully come to realize.
Ukraine is not starting from zero. Its forces already use ground robots for logistics, evacuation, mine operations and attacks. Fedorov now wants to move beyond mostly remote-controlled vehicles toward machines capable of performing some of the physical work that still keeps infantry soldiers on the front line.
From rolling supply carts to robot soldiers
Ukraine has rapidly expanded its use of unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, for jobs including carrying ammunition, evacuating wounded soldiers, laying mines and attacking positions.
In August alone, Ukrainian forces recorded more than 25,000 logistics and evacuation missions using ground robotic systems, 3.3 times as many as in January, according to figures released by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.
But calling these machines “robots” can give the wrong impression. Most are essentially rugged remote-controlled vehicles. A human operator remains in charge, often steering the machine from kilometers away.
Ukraine has experimented with combat robots before. In late 2024, the Khartiia Brigade said it carried out what it described as the war’s first documented machine-only ground assault, combining armed vehicles with mine-laying and mine-clearing robots while drones watched from above. Reuters reported at the time that human infantry still advanced afterward to secure the area, and Reuters could not independently verify the brigade’s claim.
Fedorov wants to push much further.
According to Ukrainska Pravda, he has set a six-month goal for a humanoid robot to kill a Russian soldier and a 12-month goal for robots and drones to conduct an operation together without infantry taking on its most dangerous stages.
In a recent interview with Forbes Ukraine, Fedorov claimed that the first humanoid-like prototype could appear within a month. Current versions may cost roughly $40,000 to $70,000 each, Fedorov said, but mass deployment would require bringing that down to around $10,000 to $20,000.
“We are moving away from the types of humanoids we see in the United States toward simple models that can be scaled,” Fedorov told Forbes Ukraine.
Those figures sound like they are missing some zeros, but Ukraine does not need a robot that can cook dinner, climb stairs and fold laundry. It needs machines that can reliably perform a handful of specific actions under mud, jamming, gunfire and damaged communications.
Drone playbook moves onto the ground
Fedorov is trying to repeat a strategy Ukraine has already used with drones: encourage many small manufacturers, test their machines quickly with soldiers, measure what works and rapidly manufacture successful designs. There would be dozens of proposed products, but the competitive environment would incentivize the most cost-effective solution.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said in June that 95 percent of the drones procured through its defense purchasing agency were domestically manufactured. And they make over six million a year, of various classes, from the famous FPV drones that swarm the battlefield to the medium- and long-range strike drones that are more like precision munitions with wings and a noisy diesel rotary engine.
Ground robots are actually much harder to engineer than aerial drones. They must cross trenches, rubble and mud, carry substantial loads, survive electronic warfare and continue operating when communications fail. Humanoid machines add another layer of difficulty, such as maintaining balance. A wheeled robot can remain useful even if it is crude. A two-legged machine that falls over may need a soldier to rescue it — defeating much of the point.
That helps explain why Fedorov describes the proposed machines as “humanoid-like” rather than insisting on science-fiction-like androids. Not even he knows exactly what they’re going to look like, regardless of his CGI promo videos shared on social media.
There’s also the elephant in the room. How much decision-making should eventually pass from operator to machine? Surely, such robots will be equipped with sensors and computer vision; at some point, the incentive structure is such that a super-effective killer humanoid robot equipped with autonomous AI would be too tempting not to use. The other side will then be forced to respond in kind.
For now, Ukraine’s ground systems remain overwhelmingly human-controlled. But the Army of Robots explicitly includes autonomous systems and AI. In August, the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross renewed their call for international rules governing autonomous weapons, warning about systems that can select and attack targets without further human intervention. But does anyone pretend to care what the U.N. has to say?
Fedorov’s immediate argument is that Ukraine is fighting a larger opponent while fighting an existential war. In order to keep fighting, they need to conserve their precious few soldiers from being exposed to an increasingly drone-saturated battlefield.
“We don’t have enough time,” he told Defense News. “We need to achieve these results as soon as possible.”
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/ukraine-humanoid-robot-initiative/
