If the drones in the air are the headline, the robots on the ground are the sleeper story of 2025 — the year a tracked utility vehicle began doing the work of ten infantrymen.
Ukrainian industry delivered two thousand uncrewed ground vehicles to frontline units in 2024 and fifteen thousand in 2025; twenty-five thousand are on order for the first half of 2026 alone. In the most-pressed parts of the front — Pokrovsk, Myrnograd — UGVs already handle eighty to ninety per cent of frontline logistics. The Third Assault Brigade moved two hundred tonnes of supplies in a single month by ground robot — the equivalent of ten thousand soldiers each carrying twenty kilograms.
A typical Ukrainian logistics UGV costs fifteen to twenty thousand dollars and survives seven to eight missions before being destroyed. Their primary missions are resupply — food, water, ammunition, replacement FPVs ferried out to operators ten kilometres forward — and casualty evacuation. The K-2 regiment, the Khartiia Brigade, and the Twenty-Fifth Airborne have all conducted UGV evacuations under fire. Increasingly the vehicles are also direct combatants: turret-mounted machine guns, grenade launchers, and AI-assisted target detection from DevDroid.
The Defence Minister's stated goal is the absorbing one — to put one hundred per cent of frontline logistics on robots. Whatever fraction of that target is reached, the implication for force structure is the same as for FPV operators: a soldier whose function the robot replaces is a soldier still alive at the end of a rotation. The drone war's deepest revolution may not be killing more enemies; it may be losing fewer of one's own.