Victor Pavlov showed off Ukraine’s newest and most versatile weapon: a battery-powered land robot.
The unmanned ground vehicles come in various shapes and sizes. One runs on caterpillar tracks and resembles a roofless milk float. Another has wheels and antennas. A third carries anti-tank mines. Since spring 2024 their use has grown exponentially.
“This is what modern warfare looks like. Armies everywhere will have to robotise,” said Pavlov, a lieutenant with Ukraine’s 3rd army corps.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is now in its fifth year and the conflict – Europe’s biggest since 1945 – has seen an astonishing transformation of battlefield weapons and tactics. The war has become a technological contest, fought not with expensive tanks but with cheap and expendable drones that can deliver bombs with deadly accuracy.
Ukraine’s drone expertise is now highly sought after amid the US-Israeli war against Iran. Last week Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed 10-year defence agreements with several Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to provide them with low-cost Ukrainian interceptors. They can shoot down long-range kamikaze Shahed drones, used by Tehran in its attacks on its neighbours, and by Moscow.
In my memory, which to be honest is quite limited, it was uncontroversial to say thay autonomous robots should not be used to kill people. Non-autonomous robots, such as Ukraine seems to be using, are essentially nothing more than an extension of modern arms, but one where the person ‘wielding’ the weapon is in a relatively safe place.
So you don’t remember the massive drone strike controversies or why the majority of the Iraqi and Afghanistan population will never, at any point in their lives, for the next several generations, be able to go outside without PTSD induced fear?
Or why drone operators commit suicide at significantly higher rates than other military vets?