The Next Big Thing in the Ukraine War: Ground Drones 

We arrived at the headquarters of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade’s NC-13 strike unit just after 11 p.m. The soldier escorting me tells me to turn off my phone to avoid giving away our location, and we walk in silence through the night, then enter a darkened building. Deep inside, the operations room is buzzing with activity. Double-decker computer screens line the black walls. Radios crackle, a commander is barking orders, and a knot of plainclothes drone operators huddles quietly in a corner, poring over daytime satellite images of nearby fields and forests. “They’re plotting tonight’s route,” my escort tells me. Three kamikaze ground drones—unmanned vehicles, each about as big as a medium-sized dog—will travel overland for five or six hours to blow up a Russian bunker. 

The Ukrainian defense industry is so innovative and dynamic—evolving in just five years from a few old-fashioned, Soviet-era manufacturers to global vanguard and pacesetter—that it is difficult to track all the groundbreaking developments. Already this year, Kyiv has upended the war with a new generation of long-range drones and missiles that have knocked out over one-third of Russia’s oil refining capacity. Closer to the battlefield, new mid-range drones are disrupting enemy supply lines and support logistics, dramatically slowing Russia’s advance. Most impactful for the U.S. and its Middle East allies, Ukrainian drone interceptors—whose widespread use began just over a year ago—helped Gulf states survive the Iranian Shahed strikes that threatened their cities this spring.  

Yet many strategists in Ukraine and the West are focused on a different cutting-edge development, with several predicting that 2026 will be “the year of the unmanned ground vehicle.” 

The Ukrainian military isn’t the first to experiment with ground drones. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States fielded rudimentary prototypes nearly 100 years ago. But as with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), Ukraine is the first to scale ground robots effectively, shrinking and simplifying old models and adding modern software.  

Inexpensive to produce and easy to use, a proliferating variety of aerial drones has flooded the war zone, transforming combat worldwide. UGV development is a few steps behind. While Ukraine’s aerial drone production has grown from a few thousand in 2022 to more than 7 million this year, Kyiv set an annual goal of just 50,000 UGVs.  

Still, the commanders I met at the front this summer left little doubt. “This is just the beginning,” one officer told me. “UGVs are new. We’re just learning what they can do and inventing new ways to use them. You ain’t seen nothing yet.” 

The Third Assault Brigade’s NC-13 strike unit emerged early on as a pioneer of ground-based robotic systems. Its founding officers were former infantrymen, veterans of the punishing 2023 battle of Bakhmut and the 2024 siege of Avdivka—two of the war’s fiercest engagements—which pushed them to think harder about how to protect soldiers’ lives. The unit’s deputy commander, who goes by the call sign “Bar”—a former bartender, just 23 years old, with fair skin and a reddish beard—remembers the moment. “My commander Makar and I realized we would not live long if we couldn’t find a way to fight more remotely.”  

As aerial drones transformed the battlefield, turning the traditional line of contact into a 20-mile-wide “kill zone,” units were finding it harder to supply and evacuate frontline troops. Nothing spotted from the air in the kill zone—man, machine, or tank—survives more than a few minutes. Russia is hemorrhaging troops—an estimated 1.5 million dead and wounded to date—and Ukraine is struggling to recruit for the armed forces.  

UGVs are the obvious answer—but they aren’t easy to field. Traveling overland through fields and forests is much more complex than flying through the air. As with unmanned aerial vehicles, the enemy is getting better at cutting the lines of communication between operator and drone. 

NC-13’s senior leaders walk me through the stages of Ukrainian UGV development. Early experiments focused on logistics and evacuating wounded troops. Starting in spring 2024, simple mechanized vehicles about the size of a garden cart carried food, water, and ammunition across the kill zone to waiting soldiers, then ferried wounded men and fallen comrades back to the Ukrainian rear. “The main goal in the early days,” Bar recalls, “was making things easier for the infantry.”  

By mid-2025, transport and logistics UGVs were in fairly wide use along the front line. Buggies had been fortified to carry heavy loads of wood—it takes a lot of lumber to build a bunker, and men were often killed or wounded transporting it close to enemy positions. Several units had added automated mine-layers and mine-sweepers. Others were using unmanned vehicles to carry grenade launchers closer to the fighting.  

Still, adoption was slow. Many commanders mistrusted the new systems. Logistical support was one thing, using robots in combat something else altogether. But NC-13 and a handful of other units persisted.  

A technician who gave his name as Pryanyk, a big man with a straw-colored buzzcut in charge of the NC-13 maintenance hub, tells me that the unit began experimenting with strike UGVs as early as mid-2024. Among its first experiments: fitting small autonomous vehicles with explosive payloads to create kamikaze ground robots and testing larger UGVs equipped with machine guns. 

By spring 2025, the unit was deploying strike UGVs regularly. That summer, it used a combination of FPV drones and ground robots to capture a Russian position with almost no infantry support—a first for modern warfare.  

FPVs and UGVs blasted the rough-hewn dugout until the soldiers inside waved a hand-printed cardboard sign begging to surrender. Ukrainian drone operators watched on camera as the Russians left the ruined blindage and stumbled along a dirt road, and only when they were lying prone did a Ukrainian soldier approach.  

Then, at the end of the year, in a second big breakthrough, NC-13 used a single cart mounted with a Browning machine gun to hold a stretch of the front line for 45 days. Operators in a secure shelter two-and-a-half miles behind the line controlled the drone with radio signals and serviced it periodically. But no soldier went near the line, and no Ukrainians were killed or injured. 

Everyone I met at the front had their own idea of what might come next: AI-guided ground robots that can find their own targets, ground-drone swarms, robot attacks deep in the Russian rear, and combined-arms drone assaults that coordinate UGV-laid mines, kamikaze robots, remotely controlled grenade launchers, and automated machine-gun fire. Still, these soldiers insisted, armies will always need infantry. Ground robots aren’t replacing men, just making their tasks a little easier. 

“No machine can read the battlefield the way a soldier can,” Bar explained. “You need real-time human perceptions and instant reactions. You also need men to maintain the robot and arm and pilot it. And only a man can pull the trigger.”  

At about 11:30 p.m., the three small NC-13 robots are ready to start, and the company’s commander of ground kamikaze drones, a big-bellied, tattooed man who goes by the name Vladika, steps in to explain what’s happening. “A UGV mission takes a lot more preparation than an FPV sortie,” he tells me. “You need to anticipate everything and plan how to deal with it.” 

Enemy land mines and FPVs, some waiting on the ground, others loitering in the air, pose the biggest danger but hardly the only one. Also perilous for a small unmanned system: mud, snow, uneven terrain, abandoned vehicles, craters left by incoming drones and missiles, and the tangled fiber-optic cable—both sides now use it to pilot aerial drones—that litters the kill zone.  

The team charged with tonight’s mission includes a commander, three operators, and a navigator, who happens to be a woman—an unusual sight in a Ukrainian command center. The Third Assault Brigade is one of the Ukrainian armed forces’ most elite units, so renowned for its training and leadership that it turns away many recruits. No one in the operations room except Bar is wearing a uniform; there is no display of rank. Judging by their relaxed body language, tonight’s team is a tight-knit, experienced crew. The brigade makes a point of encouraging wounded veterans to re-enlist as drone operators. One of the three operators is a double amputee.  

The three kamikaze robots being readied are shorter than the carts commonly used for logistics and evacuation—just three feet long and about two feet tall. They have been specially engineered for NC-13. The unit and the manufacturer, a Lviv-based startup called Spextr, work closely together to incorporate battlefield lessons into every iteration of the product. Each vehicle comes equipped with a camera, an antenna for GPS navigation, and a Starlink connection to the pilot in the hub—a critical feature added to many UGVs in the past year. Tonight’s target is about 50 kilometers away from the command center. “But you could operate this robot from New York,” Pryanyk tells me—anywhere with a Starlink connection. The vehicles travel at a fast-walking pace, and each carries enough explosives to destroy a small building. 

By midnight, all three vehicles are on the road, and the darkened room has gone quiet. Grainy black-and-white feeds from the three cameras show slow, steady progress through tall grass and weeds. Now and then, an abandoned vehicle looms into view, or one of the little robots slows to circumvent a puddle. A second big screen above each camera feed shows an aerial view—footage of the kill zone captured during daylight a day or two before.  

At first, it seems like slow going. Fields give way to dirt roads; there’s a long stretch on a paved road and then a cut through a tree line—but there isn’t much variety until the sun rises just after 4 a.m. Then, suddenly, the camera feeds come through in living color, and real-time footage from an accompanying aerial drone replaces the day-old terrain view.  

It’s much easier to follow the mission now—almost like a classic movie chase. You see the three little carts from the air, each about 30 to 40 yards behind the one ahead of it. The deeper they drive into the kill zone, the more ominous the obstacles they pass. The robots navigate around several waiting enemy FPVs and what the team in the hub judges to be land mines. I get distracted by a bright patch of poppies, so close—the robot’s FPV camera is at their level—you can see every petal. But the vehicles never slow.

The mission commander gives quiet orders—“right, left, right, right, straight.” The navigator helps the operator, whose hands are full piloting the lead robot, take some pulls on a vape. But even after five hours, the three operators remain intently focused, manipulating the tiny joysticks on their play stations as carefully as if there were lives at stake.  

By 5 a.m., the UGVs are just a few kilometers from the target. It’s bright daylight now—a little later than the commander hoped to arrive. The operator of the first vehicle sees something he doesn’t like as he tries to cut through a tree line not far from the Russian bunker, and he backs up, bringing his robot closer to the others. Then, suddenly, a flash appears on his screen, and two of the camera feeds dissolve into grey static.  

“Nazhal! Nazhal!”—“push, push”—the team yells to the third operator. But it’s too late. Russian troops have spotted the little convoy. A single enemy aerial drone took out two vehicles at once, and when they exploded, the blast destroyed the third UGV.  

There’s a quick postmortem in the command center. Then the team packs its gear and goes home to sleep. It feels like a bitter letdown, but hub commander Vladika is unfazed. “It’s all right,” he shrugs. “It’s only three machines. That’s the point—they’re machines, not soldiers. We can afford to lose them.”  

According to NC-13 data, 75 percent of the robotic vehicles the unit dispatches into the kill zone reach their designated targets and successfully complete their missions. “Don’t worry,” Vladika assures me confidently. “We’ll get them next time.” 

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