One of Ukraine's First Ground Combat Robots Was a Radio-Controlled Toy Car
It blew itself up in a Russian trench in 2023
Tiny flying robots are everywhere all the time along the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 41-month—and, increasingly, deep behind the front line, too.
Ground robots aren’t as numerous or as impactful. But that’s changing—fast.
It’s a change that David Kirichenko, an American war correspondent and analyst, saw coming. Two years ago, he saw one of Ukraine’s first combat-capable ground robots in action.
It was a radio-controlled toy.
“I was with a drone unit in Donetsk and this was, I believe, March of 2023 and I already saw one drone unit build a custom R.C. car packed with explosives and they drove it right into a Russian trench and, like, blew up that Russian trench,” Kirichenko said.
Twenty months later, Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicles—UGVs—had evolved. In December 2024, a Ukrainian national guard brigade orchestrated an all-robot combined-arms assault, mixing UGVs and unmanned aerial vehicles for an assault on Russian positions in Kharkiv Oblast in northern Ukraine.
“We are talking about dozens of units of robotic and unmanned equipment simultaneously on a small section of the front,” a spokesperson for the 13th National Guard Brigade explained.
At the time, the 13th National Guard Brigade defended a five-mile stretch of the front line around the town of Hlyboke, just south of the Ukraine-Russia border. It was holding back a force of no fewer than four Russian regiments: no more than 2,000 Ukrainians versus 6,000 or so Russians.
The Ukrainian operation involved remote-controlled flying surveillance and minelaying drones, one-way explosive robots on the ground and in the air as well as gun-armed UGVs.
The operation wasn’t entirely unmanned, of course. “It takes a lot of humans to just deploy the robots and ground robots—and then what if your ground robot deployed and it gets stuck in a field?” Kirichenko said.
A drone op “takes a lot of human operators behind the scenes.”
Send in the robots
But the robots replace the people where it matters the most—closest to the front, where the danger is the greatest. Ironically, that danger comes in large part from … robots. Flying ones.
Kirichenko recalled his own experience traveling to and from the line of contact. “Typically we would go on a resupply event and you’re just flying straight into the front line. The worry is that drones—the Ukrainian side does this and the Russian side also does this—that they’ll drop bombs, or they have now fiber-optic drones on the road waiting for you.”
It’s possible, as the war grinds toward its fourth year, that the majority of Ukrainian casualties now occur not along the front, but in the drone kill zone extending miles behind the front.
Drone attacks on supply lines can be decisive.
Consider that a strong Ukrainian force occupied 250 square miles of Kursk Oblast in western Russia starting in August—until Russia’s elite Rubicon drone team deployed along the flank of the Ukrainian salient and launched thousands of first-person-view drones that quickly destroyed hundreds of Ukrainian supply trucks in a chaotic week in late February.
In March, the starving Ukrainians retreated from Kursk. After a few weeks, Russian forces pursued them across the border into Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast, where a bitter border fight still rages a month later.
In Sumy and everywhere else along the front line, the Ukrainians are outnumbered three-to-one—or worse. Struggling to recruit enough infantry for its weary brigades while Russia’s own recruitment remains strong, Ukraine cannot afford to waste lives.
And it’s for that reason the Ukrainian military is probably more motivated than the Russian military is to replace people with robots wherever possible. “For Ukraine, I think it’s a necessity just because you’re fighting against a much larger power,” Kirichenko noted.
UGV ops are quickly becoming routine on both sides—but especially on the Ukrainian side. When an overconfident Russian assault group ran into a wall of Ukrainian drones outside the eastern fortress city of Pokrovsk in late March, it left behind ruined vehicles and at least one smoldering corpse.
It also wrecked a razor-wire barrier Ukrainian forces had erected to slow down Russian attacks. The Ukrainians swiftly repaired the barrier breach—by deploying a ground robot designed to unspool lengths of razor wire.
It was the continuation of an accelerating roboticization trend that began as far back as two years ago, with a radio-controlled toy carrying an explosive payload.
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