The ground vehicle ULTRA from Overland Al allows operators to deploy multiple drones with no human present.
Courtesy OVERLAND AI
By Patrick Tucker
Science & Technology Editor
April 15, 2026 10:19 PM ET
Drones
Ukraine
Russia
NATO is studying how to use ground and air robots to replace human soldiers in assaults, something Ukraine has been doing for more than a year.  But that hasn’t stopped Russia’s continuous assault with its own, increasingly autonomous one-way attack drones.On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a social-media splash with a video describing a historic first from last July: a skirmish in which Russian troops surrendered to Ukrainian robots. “The future is already on the front line—and Ukraine is building it,” Zelenskyy said in the video, adding that Ukrainian robotics companies “have already carried out more than 22,000 missions on the front in just three months.”Still, the Ukrainian president offered far fewer details than did Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade in its own July 2025 post. “Enemy fortifications were attacked” by first-person-view aerial drones and ground robots armed with explosives and made by Nazemnyi Robotychnyi Kompleks, the post said. “The next robot was already approaching the destroyed dugout when the enemy, in order to avoid being blown up, announced surrender. The occupiers who survived were taken to our lines by ‘birds’ [aerial drones] and, according to the regulations, taken prisoner.”“The operation was carried out without infantry and without losses on our side,” it said. “The occupiers surrendered to the ground robots of the Third Assault!”Ukraine’s ground-robot game advanced quickly in the following months, said Olena Kryzshanivska, a senior editor at the NATO Association of Canada who first relayed the news to English-language audiences.“Already…[by the] beginning of this year, we saw several documented cases when UGVs [unmanned ground vehicles] were used for strike missions. They were either delivering grenades [or] they were sometimes … attacking trenches, attacking Russian troops,” Kryzshanivska said in February during a podcast with CNAS adjunct senior fellow Sam Bendett.That sort of combined robotic fast maneuver is one of the ways Ukraine is forcing a reconsideration of decades of military doctrine, and NATO is taking notice. In February, its Allied Command Transformation announced the extension of a study on Force Lethality Enhancement to build out “a few practical force options and test them against realistic scenarios to see what works, and what it would take to use them on operations.”Another alliance effort to integrate ground robots, part of the multidomain Task Force X, is being led by Brig. Gen. Chris Gent, NATO deputy chief of staff transformation and integration. Venture capitalists are taking note as well. Eric Brock of Ondas Capital told Defense One in January that his firm is i