Ukraine's war robots are surging into the kill zone

KYIV REGION, Ukraine — Near the front lines in eastern Ukraine, a routine supply run can be a death sentence.

Mines, artillery, and drone-saturated skies have expanded the kill zone, threatening soldiers carrying food or ammunition to troops in the trenches. "If you send a human driver to deliver such things, there is a huge chance that he will be killed," Andrii Kushnierov, a platoon leader with Ukraine's 59th Assault Brigade, told Business Insider.

So Ukraine is increasingly sending robots instead.

These machines are no longer the crude, remote-controlled carts loaded with bombs that appeared early in the war.

Business Insider went inside a factory in the Kyiv region, far from the front lines, where workers were rapidly assembling a new generation of battlefield robots.

The vehicles rolling off the line inside the factory looked a little like military-grade golf carts, except that they didn't have seats or steering wheels.

They weren't built for a soldier to climb aboard and drive into battle. They're designed to keep the driver out of the kill zone.

Once workers fit them with electronics, heavy-duty tires, and sensors, remote Ukrainian operators will send them toward the front lines, where they'll haul ammunition, evacuate wounded troops, lay mines, launch other drones, attack Russian positions, and try to keep moving under fire.

Many won't survive for long. Some may be destroyed within days of arriving at the front. For Ukraine, that's an acceptable trade-off. These machines can be easily replaced. A soldier can't.

That also means Ukraine will need many more of these vehicles. Factories across the country are racing to replace battlefield losses and expand production, offering a glimpse of what it takes to sustain a war increasingly dominated by drones.

It's a wartime manufacturing race for cheap, rugged machines that can be built quickly, adapted easily, repaired when possible, and replaced when destroyed.

Ground robots are evolving from explosive carts into battlefield workhorses

Taras Ostapchuk used to manufacture street lamps before the war. Now he is CEO of Ratel Robotics, one of the hundreds of Ukrainian companies making ground robots.

"Most important is to save our soldiers' lives," Ostapchuk told Business Insider.

Ratel built its first ground robot in late 2023, producing a small machine packed with anti-tank mines and designed to drive toward Russian targets and detonate.

Now, Ratel's roughly 350 employees can produce hundreds of uncrewed ground vehicles, or UGVs, a month. Its robots cost between $2,000 and $40,000, depending on size and function, making the prices far lower than comparable European systems, Ostapchuk said.

"We know how to produce the cheapest battle-proof robots," he said.

Ukraine has built much of its wartime defense industry under pressure, with limited resources and heavy dependence on foreign support. The same pressures are shaping its robotics industry, and companies are racing to build low-cost, adaptable machines for a war that consumes equipment almost as quickly as it can be produced.

The war machines coming off Ratel's factory floors are built for the kinds of jobs Ukrainian soldiers are increasingly trying to avoid: hauling hundreds of kilograms of cargo or ammunition across the battlefield, laying mines, evacuating the wounded, launching FPV drones, and attacking Russian outposts.

The company is also developing robots that can launch interceptor drones for air defense missions and execute amphibious casualty evacuation, logistics, and assault missions. Testing for the latter was scheduled to begin last month, with scaled production expected to follow quickly to support operations in southern Ukraine.

"We need to destroy Russian enemies in the left bank" of the Dnipro River, Ostapchuk said, referring to the intense fighting near the Ukrainian city of Kherson.

Ratel's operation is part of a broader national effort, and Ukrainian UGVs are being sent into battle and tasked with unusual and increasingly ambitious missions. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said recently that robots had captured Russian positions and forced soldiers to surrender without direct infantry involvement.

Ukraine is building tens of thousands of ground robots and sending them into the kill zone

The push for more robots is accelerating quickly. Ukraine contracted 25,000 ground robots in the first half of 2026 — twice as many as in all of 2025 — and Zelenskyy wants 50,000 produced by the end of the year.

Zelenskyy said in April that Ukrainian-made robots had logged more than 22,000 missions since the start of the year. By June, that number had climbed to more than 50,000.

In 2022, only a few Ukrainian companies were making warfighting robots, and they were limited in function. Now, 550 different models made by 280 companies are delivering hundreds of tons of cargo to the front every week, said Andrii Hrytseniuk, the CEO of the state-backed innovation platform Brave1. Ukraine's defense ministry wants ground robots to eventually handle 100% of its battlefield logistics.

"We should not risk our soldiers," Hrytseniuk told Business Insider. "Everything that is possible to replace by drone, we are replacing with drones," he said, referring broadly to uncrewed systems.

The Ukrainian president and the country's defense ministry have praised the life-saving potential of UGVs. Troops say these robots do more than keep human soldiers out of danger: They also strengthen Ukraine's armed forces.

Grek, a UGV company commander with the 21st Unmanned Systems "Kraken" Regiment, told Business Insider that the robots increase Ukraine's "operational endurance" because they don't fatigue on missions the way humans do. Equipped with cameras and sensors, they also provide troops with greater situational awareness than they would have on their own.

And like other uncrewed systems, they deliver cheap mass. The rush to build UGVs points to a key lesson with implications beyond Ukraine. Future fights may demand more than exquisite systems that take years to produce, and instead call for large quantities of cheap robotic systems that armies can afford to lose. In future wars, production speed and replaceability may be decisive factors.

Ukraine expects many of its war robots won't survive

Kushnierov, the platoon leader, said that near the front lines, the ground robots may survive only five to 10 missions before being destroyed.

That is a loss Ukraine is willing to absorb if it keeps soldiers alive.

Although vehicle combat losses are expected, companies are taking steps to make UGVs more survivable. Ratel began installing anti-shrapnel armor on the robots this year, turning them into mini tanks of sorts with extra protection. The company is also developing technology that allows the robots to fire netting as a defense against incoming Russian first-person-view, or FPV, drones.

They're already quite durable, though.

Video footage captured by a UGV, which Ostapchuk shared with Business Insider, shows the uncrewed vehicle moving down a desolate road near the front lines when a munition suddenly strikes it from above, creating a small fireball and a plume of smoke. The robot drives out of the smoke and keeps moving.

Ratel's war robots are also designed to keep going even when obstacles like pervasive electronic interference try to cut them off. Operators can control them via Starlink, mobile networks, or radio, and Ratel is developing a feature that would allow a robot to automatically reverse 100 meters along its route if it loses connection.

Multiple cameras give operators a 360-degree view of the battlefield, while some robots are fitted with doorbell cameras, allowing UGV operators to speak to wounded troops as the machines carry them away from the front.

UGVs have a fundamental limitation, though: They see the battlefield from the ground. A Ratel instructor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons, said soldiers often use aerial drones to map main and alternate routes for UGVs before sending the ground robots forward. Pairing the systems can maximize their battlefield impact.

Ukraine is rushing to train soldiers for its expanding robot force

A short drive from the factory Business Insider visited, Ratel operates a training facility where soldiers can hone their driving skills on a dirt track lined with tires, resembling a motocross course. Last year, the company taught more than 500 operators to use its UGVs.

Driving a UGV is like driving a remote-controlled car, only larger and often armed or rigged to explode on target. Ostapchuk said soldiers with FPV drone experience can learn to operate the robots in a day. Those who haven't played video games, however, might need closer to a week, still a short training window for uncrewed systems.

At Ratel, these machines move quickly from the factory floor to the training track to the battlefield. In any given day, workers are assembling ground robots in one facility, soldiers are learning to drive them at another, and front-line units are requesting more because the machines don't often last long in front-line combat.

More and more units are starting to use UGVs, Kushnierov said. "It's too dangerous now to send logistics by manned vehicles."

That's the core of Ukraine's bet on UGVs. The robots rolling off factory production lines may be built for missions they're not expected to survive. But the machines can be replaced, unlike the soldiers they spare.

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