Ukraine to field 25,000 ground robots in push to replace soldiers for frontline logistics

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine will contract 25,000 unmanned floor autos within the first half of 2026, greater than double the 2025 whole, because the Protection Ministry strikes to shift all frontline logistics off troopers and onto robots.

Protection Minister Mykhailo Fedorov shared the goal after assembly with home UGV producers final week, the place he additionally introduced that the ministry had already begun signing contracts for 2027 to stabilize long-term producer pipelines.

“UGVs carry out vital logistics and evacuation duties on the entrance line,” Fedorov wrote in a Fb publish on April 18. “In March alone, the army carried out greater than 9,000 missions utilizing them.”

“Our aim — 100% of frontline logistics needs to be carried out by robotic methods,” the minister mentioned.

Ukraine’s Protection Ministry has spent over 14 billion hryvnia, or roughly $330 million, to push greater than 181,000 drones, UGVs and digital warfare methods to the entrance since January via a digital procurement system that permits frontline items to order gear instantly from home producers, Fedorov mentioned Thursday.

Inside days of Fedorov’s announcement, Kyiv codified the Bizon-L — a 300-kilogram-payload logistics robotic with a 50-kilometer vary — beneath NATO cataloging requirements and cleared it for operational use throughout Ukraine’s armed forces and people of allies.

Ukrainian forces have run greater than 22,000 unmanned missions up to now three months, sparing that many troopers from the warfare’s most harmful work, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy mentioned in an April 14 Arms Makers’ Day handle.

Zelenskyy pointed to 1 operation specifically.

The president described how, final summer time, operators from a robotic strike unit within the third Separate Assault Brigade, NC13, used solely aerial drones and unmanned floor autos to take a fortified Russian place in Kharkiv Oblast.

Russian troops raised a cardboard signal studying “We need to give up” earlier than drones guided them into captivity, brigade commanders mentioned, in response to CNN.

“For the primary time within the historical past of this warfare, Ukrainian warriors captured an enemy place utilizing completely unmanned platforms,” Zelenskyy mentioned.

Scaling manufacturing of tens of hundreds of UGVs to deploy throughout 1,200 kilometers of frontline inside the 12 months is not any easy feat, however Ukraine’s protection leaders have mentioned they consider they’re as much as the duty.

“We’ve round 300 ground-drone firms within the Brave1 ecosystem, up from zero in 2022,” Brave1 CEO Andrii Hrytseniuk instructed Navy Occasions in February, including that the group has issued 175 grants to ground-drone builders in the identical interval.

Brave1 is Ukraine’s government-backed defense-tech cluster, coordinating grants, testing and frontline suggestions for home and worldwide producers.

Zelenskyy emphasised the priorities of leaning into protection tech innovation in his speech earlier this month.

“That is about excessive know-how defending the very best worth — human life,” Zelenskyy mentioned.