Ukraine's drone revolution: How AI and swarm tech are redefining robotic warfare against Russia

From AI to shotguns and cheap interceptors, Ukraine is trying to drone-proof its skies

This week, with air raid warnings wailing in the distance, Kyiv held a funeral for two sisters. 12-year-old Liubava and her 17-year-old sister Vira were among 24 civilians killed by a Russian missile which reduced their residential block to rubble earlier this month. They had already lost their father who had been fighting on the front line. Their grieving mother is now the family's sole survivor. This is the human cost of the largest sustained Russian aerial assault so far - with 1,500 drones and 56 missiles fired at Ukraine within 48 hours. But the loss of life could have been even higher. Ukraine's air defences prevented more casualties. According to President Volodymyr Zelensky, 94% of those long range drones and 73% of the missiles were successfully intercepted. In comparison, on 14 May 2025, Kyiv's forces took down 55% of Russian drones launched nationwide. Ukraine is getting better at defending its skies. "We are now, unfortunately, the best in the world," says Lt Col Yuriy Myronenko, an inspector general at Ukraine's Ministry of Defence. He admits, though, that shooting down Russia's ballistic missiles "is not so easy". More than four years on from Russia's full scale invasion, Ukraine has built an increasingly sophisticated, layered air defence system. At the start of the war it relied on old Soviet-era weapons. The West then helped bolster its defences - with expensive, more sophisticated systems including Patriot air defence missiles. But Ukraine has also been developing its own home-grown solutions - from mobile fire teams operating heavy machine guns on trucks to cheap, mass-produced interceptors. Embracing innovation and technology is giving Ukraine an advantage. At the heart of Ukraine's air defences is the software that tracks every glide bomb, missile and drone launched by Russia. Sky Map uses radars, thousands of sensors and video feeds and artificial intelligence to detect threats and guide its air defences. To start with, Ukraine relied on a network of mobile phones fitted on to telegraph poles to listen out for the sound of approaching drones. Now the system uses more sophisticated sensors. The US is using Sky Map to protects one of its bases in the Middle East. And there's one weapon, more than any other, that's helping take down Russian drones: cheap interceptor drones. They're shaped like a large bullet and propelled by four rotors at the base. Ukraine is now producing more than 1,000 of these kinds of drones a day. In March this year they destroyed more than 30,000 Russian drones, according to Ukraine's air force. In a field outside the city of Kherson, Ukraine's Marine Corps Unmanned Systems Regiment shows one in action. From a static launch their P1-SUN interceptor can reach speeds of more than 300km/h (186mph) with a range of more than 30km. The unit had just completed a mission to take out Russian drones. Welkos, the commander, calls it a "very serious weapon". "It shows how quickly we can adapt, how we can hold the line and how much we can develop," he says. The P1-SUN is 3D-printed and costs around $1,000 (£750) - much less than the large $50,000 delta-winged Shahed one way attack drones that it is designed to destroy. Private companies are plugging into the system too. "We need to cover all of Ukraine and see all the targets. So accordingly, we use all the resources we have," explains Myronenko, who oversees the initiative. Twenty-five companies have already signed up to the scheme. There is an obvious incentive - to protect their factories and infrastructure. Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy grid during the winter left millions without power. Carmine Sky is one of the private companies now offering air defences for other private sector clients. They've already built a network of towers fitted with remotely controlled machine guns in the Kharkiv region - close to Russia's border. We visit their control room in the basement of a building. Rows of screens display Ukraine's Sky Map as it tracks Russian drones and jets. Behind the screens are ordinary civilians - mothers, taxi drivers and veterans. Each has been vetted and trained for a few weeks before being allowed to operate one of the remotely controlled guns. Ruslan, the company's spokesman, tells me their job "is not difficult". Operating the remote machine guns to shoot down drones "is like a computer game - just like an Xbox or PlayStation", he says. Ruslan describes their role as a "supplement to the state's air defence structure". "We're integrated into the military system," he says. "This is not the Wild West, so we follow the instructions and commands of the military." Ruslan says there are other advantages to getting the private sector involved - "we can scale much faster than the public sector". It's early days, but these private companies have already shot down dozens of Russian drones. Ukraine has also been stepping up its own attacks on Russia. Recent strikes have caused massive fires at Russian oil refineries across the country and have reached major cities like St Petersburg and Moscow, causing the Kremlin to reduce the scale of its World War Two Victory Day parade in May for fear of a Ukrainian attack. As a result both sides are now in a battle to innovate as quickly as possible, to gain an advantage in this war. Russia has been developing faster jet-powered drones. It is now flying decoy drones to identify the locations of Ukraine's air defences. There are still glaring gaps in Ukraine's air defences. At one end there is a lack of highly sophisticated, expensive missile interceptors. Ukraine still needs US-made Patriot missiles. So far they're the only effective weapon to take down Russian ballistic missiles. With the US war in Iran they're in short supply. Closer to the front line, Ukraine, like Russia, has struggled to deal with the threat of the prolific, small first-person-view (FPV) drones, which operators guide remotely to their target. They're still the cause of most casualties. Despite the technical advances in this war - nets above roads, rifles and shotguns are still the last line of defence. Defending Ukraine's skies will never be easy. President Zelensky has warned that Russia's mass attacks are designed to overwhelm its air defences. By launching hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles it is inevitable that some will get through - meaning there will be more tragic deaths like sisters Lyubava and Vira. Additional reporting by Firle Davies, Anastasiia Levchenko and Mariana Matveichuk

Sci-fi or battlefield reality? Ukraine's bet on swarm drones

Lviv (Ukraine) (AFP) - Hundreds of AI-controlled robots operating in unison, talking to each other to autonomously attack targets -- a dystopian vision of the future of war that Ukraine's defence industry wants to make a reality. Four years into the Russian invasion, the idea -- known as swarm drones -- is one of the hottest topics in military tech in a country that describes itself as the world-leader in drone warfare. "There is a huge interest," military expert Yury Fedorenko told the audience at the recent Drone Autonomy conference, held in an undisclosed location in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. "No matter who you speak to, they always say: show them to us. where are they, we want to see!" he added. The conference was organised by Iron Cluster, a group of defence groups operating out of Lviv. The prospect of drone swarms, groups of drones that can act together and fulfil set tasks without human intervention, has triggered both anxiety and excitement. "We've been talking about swarm technology for a very long time, and we in the military have been waiting for it even longer," said Volodymyr "Colt", the head of civil-military cooperation at Ukraine's 412th brigade. "The only question is when it will happen," he added. 'A few years' away Ukrainian military and defence industry figures told AFP Kyiv had made progress in getting the much-hyped technology off the ground. Others cautioned it remains some way off and that swarm drones were just one part -- albeit an eye-catching one -- of the much broader race toward autonomous warfare. The appeal is clear. The swarms would allow a few operators to deploy dozens or hundreds of attack craft simultaneously -- overwhelming enemy defences and helping Ukraine's army offset Russia's manpower advantage. "The main purpose is to save the lives of our servicemen," Andrii Lebedenko, deputy commander-in-chief, told AFP. "Today we have such projects. They're not large-scale, but they're growing... mass deployment is possible in the coming years," Lebedenko said. - 'Valid target' - Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has championed the use of advanced technology to fend off Russian attacks, including launching the Defense AI Center A1. Its head, Danylo Tsvok, told AFP "drone swarms are currently in the testing phase ... there are a lot of things that we can't say". Its systems can autonomously deploy multiple drones to an area, after which human pilots step in to manually engage a target, or operators select targets and the drones carry out the strikes autonomously. "It's definitely not at the point where we can trust technology to make strategic decisions or even make tactical decisions about what's a valid target," Fink said in a telephone interview. "We don't want our systems to make that decision. We want the humans to be in charge." - 'Manhattan Project' - At the AI defence conference in Lviv, there was some level of scepticism. "Drone swarms are totally overhyped... because they make for a good sci-fi story and a visual image," said Yaroslav Azhnyuk, head of the Fourth Law, which specialises in drone autonomy. Autonomy, he argued, was about more than just drone swarms. It covered everything from navigation, target selection and attack execution -- and could apply to all kinds of drones. He compared autonomy to the development of Microsoft Word -- concentrating on swarms was like obsessing over the button that makes text italic, instead of the whole programme. "We're focusing on massively scalable full autonomy," he said. "This is the Manhattan Project of our era," he added -- a reference to the US WWII initiative that produced the first nuclear weapon. "Imagine if either the Nazis or the Russians got the nuclear bomb first. That would have been a very, very different world," he said. "Now imagine if they get the full autonomy first," he said Russia has set AI and drones as its top military priorities. It has "likely fielded a fully autonomous unmanned system in combat", according to an April 2026 report by Kateryna Bondar, an expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Either we will achieve this -- the Armed Forces of Ukraine, together with various NATO partners -- or the enemy will."

Ukraine's sling against Russia: How 'geniuses in garages' transformed robotic warfare

In the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, a new kind of soldier was born. It doesn't breathe, it doesn't sleep, and recently, it did the unthinkable: It successfully negotiated the surrender of three Russian soldiers. This is not a scene from a science fiction novel; it is the daily reality of a defense industry that has, in just four years, evolved from "geniuses in garages" into a global leader in robotic warfare. The transformation of Ukraine's military-industrial complex is being hailed as a modern-day miracle. It is the story of how a nation with depleted stockpiles found its "sling" to fight a much larger enemy. "You know this story, I am absolutely sure, about David and Goliath," Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine's former defense minister (2021-2023), told the Magazine. "David was young, but very brave and smart. And he used cutting-edge technology as a stone and sling. And he defeated the monster. So we did the same." When Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Ukraine was facing a military giant. The traditional response would have been to meet fire with fire, but the resources simply were not there. Instead, the resistance chose a different path. "Our geniuses in garages started screwing different types of electronic warfare systems onto toys," Reznikov recalled. "We call them 'wedding ceremony drones' because they were used at weddings before the war." As the official military structure worked to secure heavy NATO weaponry, a parallel army of engineers emerged from the civilian sector. "The whole country became volunteers," Reznikov said. "Some volunteers went to the frontline, while others went to garages and started building things for the frontline - for neighbors, brothers, roommates. It became a movement of great new ideas." The road to becoming a robotic superpower was paved with skepticism. One of the most famous anecdotes from the early stages of the war involves a disagreement between Reznikov and four-star general Valerii Zaluzhnyi over the usefulness of commercial drones. "I was criticized," Reznikov said with a smile. "General Zaluzhnyi told me, 'I don't need wedding ceremony drones. I need something more serious like Raptor or Bayraktar [advanced American and Turkish military drones, respectively].'" At the time, the military establishment viewed drones through the lens of traditional aviation: large, expensive, and highly sophisticated. The "geniuses in garages," however, saw things differently. "In reality, I had no right to buy Chinese wedding ceremony drones with government funds," Reznikov explained. "But I had the right to persuade partners to give me serious drones. This war is a war of unconventional approaches. We needed to find David's sling. And we found it." The pivot to low-cost robotics changed the mathematical logic of the war. In a conventional war of attrition, the side with the larger budget and stronger industrial base usually wins. Ukraine's robotic doctrine shattered that equation. "One FPV [first-person-view] drone with thermal vision may cost a maximum of $500," Reznikov pointed out. "Russian tanks cost at least $12 million. You can destroy them with two FPV drones that cost only a few hundred dollars instead of using artillery shells worth thousands of euros. The idea was to win this war through a completely different approach." From garage drones to robot soldiers Reznikov cited the sinking of the Russian flagship Moskva in April 2022 as the ultimate proof of concept. "We sank the Russian flagship using Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles. You don't need to invest a billion dollars in a warship. You need cheaper but smarter solutions - in the water, in the air, and on the ground." While the initial spark was "romantic," as Hanna Hvozdiar, adviser to Ukraine's defense minister, described it, the industry has since evolved into a sophisticated, government-backed ecosystem. Hvozdiar is responsible for scaling garage innovations into a formal defense sector. "When Russia fully invaded us in 2022, we really were not prepared," Hvozdiar told the Magazine. "I think these technologies emerged from shortages of ammunition and equipment on the frontline. But we didn't want to give up. We needed to give our soldiers the tools to do their jobs. It was literally a matter of survival." Today, the "romantic" era is over. The Ukrainian government has removed legislative barriers, introduced incentives, and established grants to accelerate innovation. "We started with the resilience of people," Hvozdiar said, "and today the government's support has produced real results." While aerial drones have transformed the skies, Kyiv's focus is now shifting to the ground. Ground robotic systems (GRS) are being deployed for tasks once considered too dangerous for human soldiers: logistics, mining, demining, and medical evacuation. "The ground robotic system capability is quite new for us," Hvozdiar noted. "The industry's role is to create systems for different purposes. But deployment is also a challenge - integrating these systems into military units, planning operations, and implementing them effectively." The technology is evolving so quickly that the military is effectively writing the playbook in real time. "Because this capability is new, we don't yet have ground robotic specialists," Hvozdiar admitted. "We don't have ground robotic unit commanders. We are learning every single day." One of the most significant breakthroughs in this field was the recently documented capture of Russian soldiers by a robot. "This operation was something entirely new," she said. "It wasn't only about the technology; it was about planning and execution. Many people were involved. That's how they managed to capture those prisoners. It required intelligence cooperation, robot operators, and the robotic platform itself." Ground robots now face the same threats as human soldiers, such as FPV drone strikes and artillery fire. That reality has produced an unusual innovation: robots designed to rescue other robots. "I like the robots that serve our soldiers best," Hvozdiar said when asked about her favorite developments. "But we continue creating new solutions; for example, robotic systems designed to evacuate other robotic systems that are 'wounded' or damaged by Russian FPV drones. Now we even have robots for robot evacuations." This constant cycle of innovation - identifying battlefield problems and developing robotic solutions within weeks - is what Hvozdiar calls Ukraine's "defense ecosystem." With such a high degree of automation comes the question of artificial intelligence and autonomous killing machines. For Ukraine, AI remains a tool for navigation, targeting, and precision - but not a replacement for human judgment. "There are AI solutions already implemented," Hvozdiar said. "In some systems, AI is used for navigation. In others, AI helps detect incoming threats, especially in counter-UAS systems. But there is no fully independent system at the moment." The ethical and strategic reasons are clear. "We are fighting on our own territory, not on enemy territory," Hvozdiar emphasized. "So the final decision must still be made by a human." Ukraine's rapid transformation over the past four years has not gone unnoticed. Military attachés and defense companies around the world are now trying to understand how Ukraine managed to build this capability under wartime conditions. "The interest is huge," Hvozdiar said. "But it's not only interest in the technology itself. The interest is broader - it's about capability. We're talking about industry, trained operators, commanders, and training systems. All of this forms part of the defense ecosystem." Ukraine has effectively become a living laboratory for the future of warfare. "The interest in this capability is enormous because it is so new," Hvozdiar continued. "We keep experimenting with ground robotic systems, deep-strike drones, air interceptors, and Shahed-interceptor drones. This capability is new for the entire world." When asked about the next goal for Ukraine's robotic military, Hvozdiar said the primary objective is "100% automatization of air defense." "We can do this with robots, and that could protect countless civilians suffering from Russian airstrikes every day," she said. "A fully automated solution that can detect and destroy a target without human involvement - that is the next goal." The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that a smart, resilient, and technologically agile David can not only survive but systematically dismantle a Goliath. "This is not a traditional conventional war like the Second World War," Reznikov reflected. "It is a completely new type of war. We are simultaneously using Soviet-era trenches and weapons, NATO-standard systems, and entirely new technologies - robots that fly, jump, swim, and crawl." Ukraine did not set out to become a world leader in military robotics. It set out to survive. In doing so, however, it forged a "sling" that modern militaries around the world may now be forced to adopt.