Mykhailo Fedorov, the architect of Ukraine's drone revolution, has announced his next campaign: an "Army of Robots" designed to pull Ukrainian soldiers out of the line of fire and hand the most dangerous jobs on the battlefield to machines.
Fedorov unveiled the initiative on 26 September at the IT Arena technology conference in Lviv, writing on X: "We're launching the Army of Robots. In 2022, we launched the Army of Drones. Today, drones account for over 95% of battlefield strikes, and Ukraine has more than 700 UAV manufacturers. Now we need the next technological breakthrough: the robotization of warfare."
He summed up the aim in one line: "Robots should fight, not people."
"Robots should fight, not people"
The targets Fedorov set are characteristically aggressive. He said a humanoid robot should strike its first Russian soldier within six months, and that within 12 months Ukrainian forces should take a Russian position with robots and drones working together under shared algorithms — with no infantry committed to the assault.
The machines would start with simple, repeated front-line jobs: reloading a machine gun, replacing a battery, installing a sensor. From there, ground and humanoid robots would take over approaching enemy positions, laying and clearing mines, reconnaissance, logistics and casualty evacuation — precisely the tasks in which Ukrainian infantry now takes its heaviest losses.
Fedorov framed it as an ecosystem play rather than a single weapon programme: "We will invest in defense tech companies, launch our own technology projects, create R&D capabilities, test solutions together with the military, and scale up as quickly as possible the things that actually work on the battlefield."
A private initiative with heavyweight backers
Crucially, the Army of Robots is not a government procurement programme. Fedorov presented it as a private-sector initiative — a network of defence technology firms linked to the company he is founding, with Palantir chief executive Alex Karp signed on as the first investor on 1 September 2026. Recruitment for engineers, technical leads, chief technology officers and companies in Ukraine and Western countries opened on the day of the launch.
Fedorov said the effort needs "Western capital, the best engineers in the world and private initiatives," and warned that Russia "will stop only when we can break its backbone and take away all opportunities to finance the war."
The man knows the playbook. As digital transformation minister, Fedorov launched the Army of Drones on 2 July 2022 and built the Brave1 defence-tech cluster, which has paid out some $139 million in grants to more than a thousand projects. Appointed defence minister in January 2026, he was dismissed by President Zelensky in July after a clash with then-commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi over the pace of modernisation — and on 28 August, Italy's defence minister brought him on as an adviser on military innovation, uncrewed systems and air defence.
For all the bold targets, sober observers note the gaps: no named factory, no fielded prototype yet, most Ukrainian ground vehicles still remotely piloted rather than autonomous, and an announcement video that used AI-generated imagery. The timelines are aspirational, and building them into combat capability will take months or years of engineering and military integration.
The groundwork is already on the front line
Even so, the initiative is not starting from zero. Ukraine's defence ministry planned to contract 25,000 ground robots in the first half of 2026 — more than double all of 2025 — and had contracted over 22,000 by late August. Ground robots carried out 25,143 logistics and evacuation missions in August alone, against 7,511 in January, taking the year's total to about 112,000. The number of units using ground robots has risen from 117 in 2025 to 230 this year.
The systems are getting names: Termit, the workhorse 200-kilogram logistics carrier; the Droid TW 12.7 heavy machine-gun platform that disabled a Russian armoured vehicle in December 2025; MAUL, an armoured evacuation capsule built by a medical battalion. And the Third Army Corps' Operation Vivaldi — airdropping kamikaze ground robots behind Russian lines — showed what happens when machines go where humans cannot.
Russia, by contrast, has fielded 32 ground robot models but uses them far less, and its operators lost Starlink access in February, forcing them onto short-range radio that keeps them close to their machines. That asymmetry is exactly what Fedorov wants to widen.
If his timetable holds, the first assault launched without a single infantryman could come within a year. The last time Fedorov announced an "Army," the sceptics were loud — and by 2026 drones were carrying out the overwhelming majority of battlefield strikes. Moscow, which has so far failed to keep pace with Ukraine's drone revolution, has every reason to take the robot one seriously.