In a workshop not far from the front in the Kharkiv region, four-wheeled machines that soldiers call “Hyenas” are being prepared not for a demonstration, but for combat. They can carry explosives toward Russian positions, attack a dugout or help stop an assault where sending a soldier would involve far greater risk.
Such machines are appearing with increasing frequency alongside the aerial drones that have already transformed Ukraine’s battlefield. But Ukraine’s ground robots serve a different purpose: they are meant to take over the most dangerous physical tasks — carrying supplies, evacuating casualties, laying mines, providing fire support and performing parts of assault operations.
This logic did not emerge from a futuristic fascination with robots, but from a very concrete problem. Ukraine is fighting a prolonged war against an adversary with greater manpower reserves, while the battlefield has become almost transparent because of reconnaissance drones, FPV systems, thermal cameras and constant surveillance of supply routes.
Under such conditions, even delivering a few boxes of ammunition to a position can become a separate combat mission. A machine that can be lost without a human casualty is gradually becoming not an exotic addition to a unit, but a way to preserve infantry for tasks that still cannot be handed over to technology.
Daycom’s analysis indicates that the real ground-robot revolution does not begin with putting a machine gun on a remote-controlled platform. It begins when a commander can plan an operation by asking not “how many people will we lose on this route?” but “how much of this risk can we give to machines?”
The scale is no longer experimental. From January to early June, Ukrainian ground systems carried out more than 50,000 logistics and evacuation missions. In May alone there were more than 14,000, compared with over 7,500 in January.
The number of units actually using such equipment is also expanding. In November 2025, ground robots were being used by 67 units; by March 2026, that figure had risen to 167. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry has openly set the goal of moving as much frontline logistics as possible to unmanned ground systems.
In that sense, robotics does not begin with a machine-gun-equipped assault vehicle, but with the least glamorous work. A robot carries water, batteries, food and ammunition, or retrieves a wounded or fallen soldier. Every such trip means several servicemembers do not have to travel a route under Russian drone surveillance.
The state is already trying to move the process from improvised frontline engineering into serial procurement. By July, more than 22,000 unmanned ground vehicles had been contracted for 2026 — nearly twice as many as during the entire previous year. All of the contracted platforms were produced in Ukraine.
The overwhelming majority are still logistics platforms. Engineering systems come next, and combat vehicles only after that. The proportion matters: the greatest practical value of ground robots today is not their ability to replace an infantry platoon in battle, but their capacity to free soldiers from hundreds of dangerous support tasks.
Variety is growing quickly alongside quantity. In the first months of 2026, the Defense Ministry approved roughly 50 new models of ground robots for use — almost as many as were codified during all of 2025. Some platforms are modular and can change roles depending on what equipment is installed.
One machine can serve as a transport vehicle, an evacuation platform or a carrier for a combat module. Another can lay or remove mines. Heavier systems can carry hundreds of kilograms of cargo and transport electronic-warfare equipment, reconnaissance systems or remotely operated weapons.
Ukraine’s Bizon-L, for example, can carry up to 300 kilograms and uses several communications channels, including LTE, Wi-Fi and Starlink. That redundancy is not a matter of convenience: on the battlefield, Russian forces are constantly trying to jam or disrupt control of unmanned systems.
Combat platforms are also moving beyond the stage of one-off prototypes. In August, Ukrainian units were already testing cheaper ground systems fitted with robotic turrets designed for standard Kalashnikov rifles. The idea is not to scale the most expensive possible robot, but a simpler system that can be produced by the thousand.
Earlier, the “Lyut” system, equipped with a 7.62 mm machine gun, had also been approved for use. It is intended for observation and fire support, uses an electric motor and is controlled by an operator from a protected position. That is a crucial distinction: for now, the trend is mainly toward remote robotics, not autonomous machines deciding on their own to open fire.
That is why the popular image of “killer robots” oversimplifies what is happening on the battlefield. A ground platform may carry a machine gun or explosives, but a human remains in the control loop. Movement, stabilization, navigation and part of the analysis can be automated, but this is not yet an army of autonomous machines choosing their own targets.
One of the units experimenting most aggressively with these systems is NC13 of Ukraine’s Third Army Corps. Its operators use ground platforms almost every day, from destroying logistics routes to suppressing Russian infantry with gunfire coordinated with FPV drones.
In one operation, a robot pulled a trailer loaded with explosives onto a bridge used by Russian logistics, after which the charge was detonated. In another, a machine-gun-equipped ground vehicle held back an assault group while aerial drones attacked from above. This kind of interaction is gradually creating new battlefield tactics.
There are also episodes that only a few years ago would have sounded like military science fiction: NC13 servicemembers say Russian soldiers have surrendered to ground robots. It is not yet a mass phenomenon, but it illustrates how radically the idea of battlefield presence has changed — an enemy soldier can surrender to a machine whose operator may be far away.
Andrii Biletskyi, commander of the Third Army Corps, describes the gradual replacement of infantry functions with ground robots as the next revolution in warfare. The corps has set an ambitious goal: by the end of the year, it wants to replace roughly one-third of people on the forward line with machines wherever the nature of the task allows.
That does not mean cutting infantry by one-third through a single order. It is about functions. If a robot delivers ammunition, evacuates a wounded soldier, performs sentry duty with a combat module or carries a mine forward, a servicemember can be used where human presence is truly necessary — controlling terrain, making decisions and fighting complex engagements.
Biletskyi estimates that under the constant threat of aerial drones, traditional infantry now performs only a small part of the range of tasks it once did. Many functions have been redistributed among unmanned systems, remote surveillance, artillery and other technological components.
That fits into a broader transformation of the Ukrainian military. At the beginning of 2026, President Volodymyr Zelensky said drones already accounted for more than 80% of Russian targets destroyed. The robotization of the ground is therefore following a drone revolution that has already altered the balance of capabilities in the air above the front.
Ukraine has also created dedicated Unmanned Systems Forces combining aerial, maritime and ground platforms. The logic extends beyond any single machine: a reconnaissance drone detects a target, a ground robot performs the physical task, a strike drone attacks, and digital systems bring all of them into a common command network.
The way these platforms work together may ultimately matter more than the specifications of any individual robot. A slow UGV is easy to spot and destroy if it operates alone. But when reconnaissance drones monitor its route, FPVs suppress the enemy and the ground vehicle brings ammunition or a weapons module forward, the effect becomes systemic.
This model is especially important for Ukraine because of its manpower shortage. Russia can keep pressing with small infantry groups and probing for weak points across a very long front. Ukraine is trying to offset that numerical imbalance with cheaper machines, sensors and remote presence.
Ground robots, however, remain far more difficult to operate than aerial drones. A drone can fly over a trench, shell crater, fallen tree or minefield. A wheeled or tracked machine must physically negotiate every obstacle, and a small ditch, wire, mud or a destroyed bridge can halt an entire mission.
Communications create another barrier. A ground platform operates close to the surface, where line-of-sight conditions are worse and concrete, tree lines and terrain quickly block signals. Repeaters and multiple communications channels help, but Russian electronic warfare forces developers to keep changing protocols and control methods.
There are also tasks that a robot still cannot perform the way a trained assault team can. It cannot clear a complicated network of basements, read a person’s behavior from a few meters away or move through a chaotic trench with the same flexibility as an infantryman. Operators themselves describe those limits as one of the main boundaries of the current generation of UGVs.
Quantity is another problem. Aerial FPV drones have already become expendable munitions that can be used in large numbers. Ground robots are more expensive, mechanically more complex and still produced at a much smaller scale, meaning commanders cannot simply send dozens of them into every assault and absorb the losses.
That is why the next revolution is unlikely to resemble columns of mechanical infantry from science fiction. At first, robots will take over more and more routine work: tens of thousands of supply runs, evacuations, deliveries, mining missions and guard duties that once required a constant human presence inside the kill zone.
But the accumulation of such small changes gradually rewrites tactics themselves. If a commander knows a machine can be the first to enter a dangerous area, an operation that once would have been rejected because of expected human losses may suddenly become possible.
Biletskyi describes this as giving commanders back room for creativity: war remains an art of decision-making, but technology should reduce the need to pay for every attempt with human lives. In that sense, robotics becomes not only a technical issue, but a command philosophy.
That idea coincides with changes at the top of Ukraine’s military. In July, Mykhailo Drapatyi became commander-in-chief, replacing Oleksandr Syrskyi. The leadership presented the change as part of an effort to modernize command, accelerate technological adaptation and make the preservation of military personnel one of the basic measures of effectiveness.
Biletskyi himself received a significantly larger role in the defense of the Donetsk region in August, where Russian forces are pressing toward key cities in Ukraine’s so-called fortress belt. His approach to unmanned systems will therefore now be tested not only within a single corps, but on one of the most difficult fronts of the war.
For Western militaries, Ukraine’s experience raises an uncomfortable question. Many countries spent years investing billions in highly expensive platforms, while the war has demonstrated the value of cheaper systems that can be modified quickly and lost without strategic consequences. Biletskyi argues that the West largely missed the previous drone revolution.
The next competition may not be about producing one “best” combat robot. It may instead be about the ability to manufacture thousands of simple platforms, change their modules quickly, preserve communications under electronic warfare and connect ground, aerial and digital systems into a single network. The speed of adaptation is becoming a military capability in its own right.
Ukraine is already building an industrial base for that approach. In 2026, contracts for ground robots are measured in the tens of thousands, while military units can independently order the systems they need through digital defense procurement platforms. That shortens the distance between a frontline requirement and a manufacturer.
Yet the most meaningful measure of this technology will ultimately not be the number of machines purchased. It will be the number of missions in which a soldier no longer had to walk into an FPV threat, carry a box across a tree line under fire or return for a wounded comrade along a route already watched by the enemy.
Ukraine’s ground robots cannot yet replace infantry, and the military does not pretend otherwise. But they are already beginning to change what the word “infantry” itself means, leaving humans with less mechanical labor and more of what machines still cannot do: understand a situation, accept risk consciously and make decisions.
If this model scales, the next phase of the war will not look like a front without people. It will look like a front where people are less and less often the first to enter the most dangerous place.
And for Ukraine, which cannot afford to expend soldiers the way Russia does, that may become the most important characteristic of a combat robot: not how much it can destroy, but which Ukrainian servicemember it allows commanders not to send under fire.
