Hasta la vista, baby.
Ukraine reportedly pulled off a record 7,000 missions in a month using land robots to fend against Russian forces, as the war-torn country continues to beef up its use of cyborgs on the battlefield.
“The frontline is more like Terminator,” a drone operator with Ukraine’s 25th airborne brigade, named Bambi, told The Guardian. “A land robot arrives at your position and there is nothing you can do about it.
“You can shoot a person in the chest and they stop firing. If you shoot a ground robot it doesn’t feel pain.”
When Kyiv first deployed robots to the frontlines in 2024, they came in limited shapes and sizes. Now a variety of killer droids can fire shots, lay mines and launch grenades at the enemy — among other tasks that led to the record-breaking mission count in January.
More than a hundred Russian troops even surrendered to the tin men that same month, according to Ukrainian Minister of Defense Mykhailo Fedorov.
“This winter, more than 100 occupiers laid down their arms thanks to the work of unmanned units,” he proudly wrote on X.
In the past two years, the use of robots shot up exponentially — with production increasing nearly sixfold in 2025, the fastest growing sector in Ukraine’s defense technology sector.
The bots had an estimated market size of $252 million last year, according to a study by Kyiv School of Economics published this week.
They don’t just fight. Since December, they’ve been bringing provisions to Ukrainian soldiers in the critical region of Donetsk, which has seen some of the most intense fighting since Russia’s invasion.
“One rolled up to the entrance of our dugout. I felt like a caveman gazing at alien technology,” marveled Bambi. “It looked so futuristic.”
In fact, land robots now make up 90% of Ukrainian army logistics — delivering food, ammunition, and other supplies, instead of having humans risk their lives to do it.
“It’s very difficult to move around because of enemy first-person-view drones. So we use robotic systems,” Victor Pavlov, a lieutenant with Ukraine’s 3rd army corps told the outlet.
They can even sweep up mines or evacuate up to three wounded soldiers from the frontlines, all done by remote control from a distance.
In 2024 Kyiv let loose a fleet of $9,000-a-pop robot dogs capable of committing “kamikaze” attacks on Russian soldiers.
And the defense ministry in March 2025 approved the deployment of its machine-gun-toting “Fury” robots to the frontlines.
Ukraine’s military leaders are planning to expand production even further this year, as the nation enters the fifth year of Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
