Inside Ukraine’s plan to build an army of killer robots to defeat Russia
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Ukraine’s youngest government minister is building an army of killer robots and hopes to find his country’s answer to English engineer Barnes Wallis to help defeat Russia.
Under Mykhailo Fedorov’s watch, dozens of Soviet-legacy laws have been scrapped to encourage the creation of the next generation of weapons for Kyiv’s armed struggle against their Russian invaders.
With state procurement rules eased and a free-market established, more than 200 Ukrainian companies are involved in the effort, unafraid of failure in the spirit of innovation.
Some have compared Mr Fedorov’s mission to America’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is best known for its involvement in the creation of the internet, GPS and stealth bombers.
“You know war starts with one level of technology and ends with a totally different level of technology,” he told the Sunday Telegraph from his office in Kyiv.
While Wallis helped Britain produce weapons like the bouncing bomb during the Second World War, Mr Fedorov isn’t pinning his hopes on the creation of a wonder weapon.
But the 32-year-old minister for digital transformation knows technology can help save the lives of his countrymen and offset Russia’s advantage in manpower.
“We don’t have many people and we value the lives of every soldier,” said Mr Fedorov.
The latest of his projects is the creation of an “Army of Robots” to carry out tasks that Ukrainian soldiers would often have to risk their lives to do.
Already arriving on the battlefield are automated machine guns with artificially-intelligent aiming systems that don’t require human interaction.
There have also been recent announcements made about the creation of robots that can lay Ukrainian mines and dig up explosives left in the ground by Russian forces.
“We want robots that can absorb as much of the enemy’s firepower as possible, so we can be flexible and avoid losing the lives of our soldiers,” Mr Fedorov added.
And there are more fanciful ideas, but concepts that are not out of the realms of possibility.
He would like to see fleets of self-driving vehicles that can move weapons, deliver ammunition and evacuate wounded soldiers from the front line.
Successful tests have already been carried out on the next generation of air-defence sensors, that combine secretive technologies the Sunday Telegraph has decided not to disclose for security reasons with artificial intelligence.
It can help identify Russian missiles and drones, as well as track their eventual path using technology, which was designed in Ukraine, and completely different from the radar systems donated to Kyiv by Nato countries.
What’s going on in our skies
“It’s really helpful for us in order to get a better understanding of what’s going on in our skies,” Mr Fedorov said, adding: “It’s a quite revolutionary breakthrough technology.”
Mr Federov, like the enigmatic head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, Kyrylo Budanov, 37, is part of a growing band of younger Ukrainian leaders in the country’s war effort.
Most of the work in his office is conducted from a computer gaming chair. When he’s not busy, he plays online chess and reads to brush up the latest technologies.
Many of the projects he is spearheading are made possible by a legion of celebrity fundraisers, including Star Wars actor Mark Hamill, heavyweight boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk and Virgin entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.
They have all been recruited by United 24, the fundraising platform established by president Volodymyr Zelensky, to raise money for medical supplies, the rebuilding of Ukraine and supplying drones for its armed forces.
Their Project Unity raised over £5 million in a few days to purchase more than 10,000 first-person-view drones and ammunition for Ukrainian soldiers on the front line.
The same model was repeated to bring in cash to develop and manufacture the kamikaze maritime drones used by Kyiv’s forces to target the Crimean bridge and Russia’s Black Sea Fleet off the coast of the occupied peninsula.
Historian Timothy Snyder is about to launch a new fundraising campaign with Mr Fedorov to help produce the air-defence sensors.
To date, more than 700 applications for grants from the fund have been received, offering Ukraine’s forces a potential array of military technologies – ammunition, drones, radio and electronic warfare systems.
“You can believe me, this is a project which accumulates the whole Ukrainian expertise in terms of innovation,” Mr Fedorov said.
“And it allows us to engage very famous personalities from the whole world to open up accelerators and venture funds in Ukraine.”
The 32-year-old has high hopes for the schemes, insisting they are already making history and will be the “driver of our outlook of future and developing technologies, which can be subsequently used by other countries”.
