Mykhailo Fedorov has launched an “Army of Robots” initiative to shift some of Ukraine’s most dangerous battlefield tasks from soldiers to humanoid and other autonomous machines. He cast the effort as the “next stage of the technology-driven approach” behind Ukraine’s Army of Drones.
What the plan includes
According to Fedorov, the program will focus on physical AI, robotics, and autonomous systems for logistics, reconnaissance, mine work, evacuation, position defense, and strikes. He said it will span humanoids, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and other unmanned weapons—built and tested by a broader ecosystem of private companies, investors, researchers, and military units rather than a single firm.
The vision goes beyond wheeled or tracked platforms. Fedorov described humanoid machines performing relatively simple but high‑risk tasks alongside other robots: reloading weapons, swapping batteries, installing sensors, delivering ammunition, and carrying wounded troops. The goal is for robots to move in first after sensors flag a threat so soldiers are not the first bodies in the kill zone.
Aggressive early timelines
Ukrainska Pravda reported that the first “hard target” is a humanoid robot carrying out a lethal strike on a Russian soldier within six months of launch. Within a year, the project aims to run its first combined robot‑and‑drone mission, with machines communicating through shared software.
Funding, scale, and the race with Russia
“We will invest in defense tech companies, launch our own technology projects, build R&D capabilities, test solutions alongside the military and scale as quickly as possible whatever proves effective on the battlefield,” Fedorov wrote on social media. “Our biggest challenge is that Russia has learned to rapidly copy and scale military technologies. That means we must constantly create the next technology cycle before the enemy does.”
Fedorov also announced a new defense‑tech company with Palantir CEO Alex Karp as its first major investor, as well as a Kyiv‑based venture fund for Ukrainian defense startups and manufacturers, according to the initiative’s outline. He added that drones already account for more than 95 percent of strikes in Ukraine and that more than 700 UAV manufacturers now operate in the country. The next push, he said, is to bring “the same scale of experimentation on the ground.”
State of play
The initiative is in its early days, with Fedorov recruiting engineers, robotics teams, companies, and investors. Its core bet is that machines can take the first step into minefields and other kill zones—and that Ukraine can invent the next cycle of battlefield technology faster than Russia can copy it.
