KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine will contract 25,000 unmanned ground vehicles in the first half of 2026, more than double the 2025 total, as the Defense Ministry moves to shift all frontline logistics off soldiers and onto robots.
Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov shared the target after meeting with domestic UGV manufacturers last week, where he also announced that the ministry had already begun signing contracts for 2027 to stabilize long-term manufacturer pipelines.
“UGVs perform important logistics and evacuation tasks on the front line,” Fedorov wrote in a Facebook post on April 18. “In March alone, the military carried out more than 9,000 missions using them.”
“Our goal — 100% of frontline logistics should be performed by robotic systems,” the minister said.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry has spent over 14 billion hryvnia, or roughly $330 million, to push more than 181,000 drones, UGVs and electronic warfare systems to the front since January through a digital procurement system that allows frontline units to order equipment directly from domestic manufacturers, Fedorov said Thursday.
Within days of Fedorov’s announcement, Kyiv codified the Bizon-L — a 300-kilogram-payload logistics robot with a 50-kilometer range — under NATO cataloging standards and cleared it for operational use across Ukraine’s armed forces and those of allies.
Ukrainian forces have run more than 22,000 unmanned missions in the past three months, sparing that many soldiers from the war’s most dangerous work, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an April 14 Arms Makers’ Day address.
Zelenskyy pointed to one operation in particular.
The president described how, last summer, operators from a robotic strike unit in the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, NC13, used only aerial drones and unmanned ground vehicles to take a fortified Russian position in Kharkiv Oblast.
Russian troops raised a cardboard sign reading “We want to surrender” before drones guided them into captivity, brigade commanders said, according to CNN.
“For the first time in the history of this war, Ukrainian warriors captured an enemy position using exclusively unmanned platforms,” Zelenskyy said.
Scaling production of tens of thousands of UGVs to deploy across 1,200 kilometers of frontline within the year is no simple feat, but Ukraine’s defense leaders have said they believe they are up to the task.
“We have around 300 ground-drone companies in the Brave1 ecosystem, up from zero in 2022,” Brave1 CEO Andrii Hrytseniuk told Military Times in February, adding that the organization has issued 175 grants to ground-drone developers in the same period.
Brave1 is Ukraine’s government-backed defense-tech cluster, coordinating grants, testing and frontline feedback for domestic and international manufacturers.
Zelenskyy emphasized the priorities of leaning into defense tech innovation in his speech earlier this month.
“This is about high technology protecting the highest value — human life,” Zelenskyy said.
Read the full article here
