How autonomous drone warfare is emerging in Ukraine

From the article:

A thorough analysis of the Middle East conflict will take some time to emerge. And so to understand the direction of this new way of war, look to Ukraine, where its next phase—autonomy—is already starting to come into view. Outnumbered by the Russians and facing increasingly sophisticated jamming and spoofing aimed at causing the drones to veer off course or fall out of the sky, Ukrainian technologists realized as early as 2023 that what could really win the war was autonomy. Autonomous operation means a drone isn’t being flown by a remote pilot, and therefore there’s no communications link to that pilot that can be severed or spoofed, rendering the drone useless.

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Since then, The Fourth Law has dispatched “more than thousands” of autonomy modules to troops in eastern Ukraine (it declines to give a more specific figure), which can be retrofitted on existing drones to take over navigation during the final approach to the target. Azhnyuk says the autonomy modules, worth around US $50, increase the drone-strike success rate by up to four times that of purely operator-controlled drones.

And that is just the beginning. Azhnyuk is one of thousands of developers, including some who relocated from Western countries, who are applying their skills and other resources to advancing the drone technology that is the defining characteristic of the war in Ukraine. This eclectic group of startups and founders includes Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, whose company Swift Beat is churning out autonomous drones and modules for Ukrainian forces. The frenetic pace of tech development is helping a scrappy, innovative underdog hold at bay a much larger and better-equipped foe.

All of this development is careening toward AI-based systems that enable drones to navigate by recognizing features in the terrain, lock on to and chase targets without an operator’s guidance, and eventually exchange information with each other through mesh networks, forming self-organizing robotic kamikaze swarms. Such an attack swarm would be commanded by a single operator from a safe distance.

According to some reports, autonomous swarming technology is also being developed for sea drones. Ukraine has had some notable successes with sea drones, which have reportedly destroyed or damaged around a dozen Russian vessels.

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While uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have received the most attention, the Ukrainian military is also deploying dozens of different kinds of drones on land and sea. Ukraine, struggling with the shortage of infantry personnel, began working on replacing a portion of human soldiers with wheeled ground robots in 2024. As of early 2026, thousands of ground robots are crawling across the gray zone along the front line in Eastern Ukraine. Most are used to deliver supplies to the front line or to help evacuate the wounded, but some “killer” ground robots fitted with turrets and remotely controlled machine guns have also been tested.

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Today’s Shaheds fly faster and higher, and therefore are more difficult to detect and take down. Between January 2024 and August 2025, the number of Shaheds and Shahed-type attack drones launched by Russia into Ukraine per month increased more than tenfold, from 334 to more than 4,000. In 2025, Ukraine found AI-enabling Nvidia chipsets in wreckages of Shaheds, as well as thermal-vision modules capable of locking onto targets at night.

“Now, they are interconnected, which allows them to exchange information with each other,” Solntsev says. “They also have cameras that allow them to autonomously navigate to objects. Soon they will be able to tell each other to avoid a jammed region or an area where one of them got intercepted.”

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MaXon’s solution consists of ground turrets scanning the sky with infrared sensors, with additional input from a network of radars that detects approaching Shahed drones at distances of, typically, 12 to 16 km. The turrets fire autonomous fixed-winged interceptor drones, fitted with explosive warheads, toward the approaching Shaheds at speeds of nearly 300 km/h. To boost the chances of successful interception, MaXon is also fielding an airborne anti-Shahed fortification system consisting of helium-filled aerostats hovering above the city that dispatch the interceptors from a higher altitude.

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Despite the progress on both sides, analysts say that the kind of robotic warfare imagined by Azhnyuk won’t be a reality for years.

“The software for drone collaboration is there,” says Kate Bondar, a former policy advisor for the Ukrainian government and currently a research fellow at the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Drones can fly in labs, but in real life, [the forces] are afraid to deploy them because the risk of a mistake is too high,” she adds.