Victor Pavlov showed off Ukraine’s newest and most versatile weapon: a battery-powered land robot.
The unmanned ground vehicles come in various shapes and sizes. One runs on caterpillar tracks and resembles a roofless milk float. Another has wheels and antennas. A third carries anti-tank mines. Since spring 2024 their use has grown exponentially.
“This is what modern warfare looks like. Armies everywhere will have to robotise,” said Pavlov, a lieutenant with Ukraine’s 3rd army corps.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is now in its fifth year and the conflict – Europe’s biggest since 1945 – has seen an astonishing transformation of battlefield weapons and tactics. The war has become a technological contest, fought not with expensive tanks but with cheap and expendable drones that can deliver bombs with deadly accuracy.
Ukraine’s drone expertise is now highly sought after amid the US-Israeli war against Iran. Last week Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed 10-year defence agreements with several Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to provide them with low-cost Ukrainian interceptors. They can shoot down long-range kamikaze Shahed drones, used by Tehran in its attacks on its neighbours, and by Moscow.
Good and evil are indeed social constructs, but stupid isn’t.
I pay deep attention to the war in Ukraine, their actions in Russia and vice versa. What you are posing is a false equivalency. Ukraine may target petroleum infrastructure, but does not target hospitals, schools or indeed apartment complexes - whereas Russia does it all the time to break the Ukrainian spirit. This is all open source intelligence and has been verified conclusively all across the world. There’s no such thing as a private war in 2026.
The motives are clear. Ukraine is fighting for it’s right to exist, for it’s people not to be genocided by Russians, for it’s language and culture to be preserved from an opposing fascist imperialist power. Russia wants to take over, to subjugate and control the entirety of Ukraine, all at once - or bits and pieces, and they’ll use all the automated weaponry they can gather to do so.
Therefore what you want is for Ukraine to be trodden down to meet with your ideological fancies - in effect enabling and even justifying said fascist imperialist power - by telling Ukraine and even Europe to lay down it’s arms, throw our hands up and give in to to a fascist dictatorship that would have you and your ideals sent to the gulag.
It’s quite possible that you’re just another Russia bot, like the various parties and shills across Europe who “just want peace”, when what they really want is to cut off all support from Ukraine so that Russia can steamroll them - so they have earned the salary given to them by the Kremlin.
But let’s say you’re just anti war to the core, against any and all military power. Why don’t you go to Putin and Russia first? Why not go to the Iranians, the Chinese or even the Americans with your demands? Do you think they’ll just cancel all development, all production and manufacturing, that all engines will cease?
Nuts! You’re an ostrich, sir. You care not for the safety, security and freedom of Europeans. You’d have Russia go into Poland, Lithuania and Finland to lay claim to these countries, to destroy their way of life, to subjugate them via russifiafication, that their history, language and culture be expunged to be yet another “republic”, yet another colony and vassal state to a fascist empire.
That will be the success they need to go even further. They even want to march through Berlin, as they said at the beginning of the war. You cannot reason with fascists or imperialists. At a point there’s nothing doing but to raise arms and fight for your freedoms - because if they take over, just look at what they’re doing to Russians currently. It’ll be a thousand times worse the further away it is optically from the Kremlin.
You’re not fighting fascism. You’re an enabler, a facilitator, a supporter of fascism. Either this kind of technology is widespread, standardized and decentralized, or one party holds all the cards - which will lead to more imperialism and fascism, more death, more genocide.
PANDORAS BOX CANNOT BE CLOSED.