Why Ukraine Remains the World's Most Innovative War Machine (August 2025)
www.politico.com

... The Ukrainian soldiers couldn't believe what they were seeing. One of their aerial drones had spotted two Russian soldiers trapped in a dugout.

"Our main mission was to destroy the shelter along with the enemy," said Vladyka, the commander of the drone crew in the 3rd Assault Brigade, in an interview with POLITICO Magazine at a hidden training site 20 miles from the front lines in eastern Ukraine. Working closely with first-person-view (FPV) drone pilots, the team launched a ground-based kamikaze drone rigged with three anti-tank mines directly into the tree line that concealed the enemy's dugout. "The blast was powerful," Vladyka, 35, said, "a very strong explosion."

As the team loaded a second ground drone with explosives, the Russians suddenly emerged from the entrance of their hideout. They had scrawled a message in blue Cyrillic letters on a makeshift white poster and were frantically waving it skyward at the hovering drone: "We want to surrender."

That's when the 3rd Brigade recorded a video of something that they believe had never happened before: The first successful assault carried out exclusively by robots.

Courtesy of the 3rd Assault Brigade

"We flew up to them and signaled them to follow us," said one of the UAV operators who goes by the call name Major. "They understood everything right away." The Russians followed the aerial drone across open ground toward Ukrainian lines, where they were taken into custody. "Our comrades put them face down on the ground and took them," Major, 33, said.

The 21-year-old operator of the ground robot (call sign LaCoste) said he was still surprised by how quickly the Russians made the decision to surrender. "Although I understand their motivation: a small vehicle pulls up to them and there's a bunch of explosives. Enough to destroy a dugout," he said.

The rapid advancement and widespread use of inexpensive observation and strike drones -- in the air and on the ground -- have transformed warfare in Ukraine since 2022 and is one of the biggest reasons Ukraine has managed to bring its far larger adversary to a stalemate.

What is surprising, however, is how the pace of innovation has continued -- yielding small tactical breakthroughs like the soldiers' surrender and also technological leaps that have fundamentally altered battlefield tactics across the entire war zone. ...