An All-Robot Ukrainian Assault Team Terrorized Russian Troops Into Surrendering
It was the second all-drone Ukrainian operation since December
Back in December, a Ukrainian brigade orchestrated the first-ever all-robot combined-arms assault, mixing unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles for an attack on Russian positions in Kharkiv Oblast in northern Ukraine.
In recent days, a different Ukrainian brigade repeated the feat—with another all-robot air and ground assault that ended with two Russian soldiers surrendering.
It’s a trend. An accelerating one.
Short on trained infantry but flush with robots, the Ukrainian military is winning more and more battles without any human beings at the point of contact.
“Fighting against a much bigger power, Ukraine throughout the war has needed to leverage technology to be able to fight back and take the fight to Russia,” war correspondent David Kirichenko explained.
Kirichenko observed one of the first robotic ground assaults way back in 2023, when a Ukrainian brigade he was embedded with rolled an explosives-laden radio-controlled toy car into a Russian bunker.
Robot operation
In December, the Ukrainian 13th National Guard Brigade was defending a five-mile stretch of the front line around the town of Hlyboke, just south of the Ukraine-Russia border. The brigade held back a force of no fewer than four Russian regiments: around 2,000 Ukrainians versus 6,000 or so Russians.
The guard brigade leveled the playing field … with technology.
On or just before Dec. 20, the guardsmen deployed a mixed force of aerial surveillance and minelaying drones, one-way explosive ground robots and gun-armed ground ’bots.
“We are talking about dozens of units of robotic and unmanned equipment simultaneously on a small section of the front,” a spokesperson for the 13th National Guard Brigade stated.
Working together, the robots cleared a Russian trench.
Eight months later this week, the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade—also defending Kharkiv—deployed its own combined force of UAVs and UGVs to similar effect.
The target was a deep Russian dugout. A position that the 3rd Assault Brigade’s infantry “had been unable to storm,” according to a brigade drone operator. Estonian analyst WarTranslated helpfully translated the brigade’s official video about the operation.
While at least one surveillance UAV watched from overhead, an explosive first-person-view drone struck the dugout. After that, an explosive ground robot rolled in, triggering its payload of three anti-tank mines on top of the Russian position. “A very big explosion,” an operator recalled.
The dugout wasn’t totally destroyed by the first two blasts. The 3rd Assault Brigade was about to roll in a second explosive UGV when two Russian survivors tossed a scrap of cardboard out of the dugout. On the cardboard they’d written a plea for mercy: “We want to surrender.”
A UAV appeared overhead and led the two Russians down the road to some waiting Ukrainian infantry. Without anyone on the Ukrainian side exposing themself to Russian fire, the 3rd Assault Brigade eliminated an important strongpoint in the Russian line. “Our work reduces human losses,” a brigade robot operator said.
Expect this sort of thing to happen more often. “Things are trending towards that right now: replacing as many human functions as possible with some of these ground robots,” Kirichenko said.
That not only means robotic ground assaults under robotic air cover, it also means more Ukrainian units automating their supply lines. Most Ukrainian losses occur not at the front line, but behind it—as Russian bombs, missiles and drones target Ukrainian trucks carrying supplies and fresh troops to the front line and injured troops from the line.
“These vehicles will get hit—and Ukrainian soldiers need to buy vehicles and repair them constantly,” Kirichenko explained. “So the more that you can get ground robots into those very dangerous missions of getting supplies, handling your logistics, the more that you can save your human soldiers.”
Ironically, the unmanned operators require a lot of manpower. “There’s no such a thing where you can completely replace humans—and it takes a lot of humans to just deploy the [aerial] robots and ground robots and then what if your ground robot is deployed and it gets stuck on a field?” Kirichenko mused.
“The complexity of just deploying it, maneuvering it … people watching it, ensuring that it’s actually conducting its mission, it takes a lot of human operators behind the scenes.”
But it’s safer to operate robots from a distance than it is to drive a supply truck or directly assault a Russian trench. It’s the reduction in manpower losses, not the reduction in manpower billets, that make robots so attractive for the Ukrainians.
Read more:
One of Ukraine's First Ground Combat Robots Was a Radio-Controlled Toy Car
Tiny flying robots are everywhere all the time along the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 41-month—and, increasingly, deep behind the front line, too.