A Very Brave Ukrainian Gun 'Bot Sneaked 204 Pounds Of Explosives Into A Russian Bunker

The resulting explosion was ... big

A TM-62 anti-tank mine packs around 17 pounds of explosives—enough to break the track off a passing tank or even punch through the tank’s steel belly.

Twelve TM-62 anti-tank mines pack no less than 204 pounds of explosives. That’s enough to topple a small building.

So when the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade’s NC-13 robotics unit piled a dozen TM-62s onto one of its DevDroid TW 12.7s—125-pound tracked unmanned ground vehicles—and carefully steered the UGV into a Russian bunker presumably somewhere south of the ruins of Kupiansk in eastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv Oblast, it made a very big boom.

As seen in an official video, the NC-13 team broke into cheers when an escorting aerial drone registered the blast. The team had carefully assembled, painted and deployed the robot apparently over a period of days, maneuvering it more than 12 miles across rough terrain to deliver the explosive payload.

“As a result of which it was possible to destroy an enemy group, and the vacated area was occupied by our infantry,” NC-13 reported. (See video at top.)

This was not the first deployment of kamikaze ground robot in Russia’s 46-month wider war on Ukraine, although it may have been one of the most explosive.