Ukraine's soldiers are getting new jobs in the robot war

A robot army is transforming the Ukrainian front lines.

Human soldiers who once risked life and limb in the kill zone are being replaced by uncrewed ground vehicles that haul ammunition, deliver food, carry weapons, and evacuate wounded troops.

The machines are doing more than keeping soldiers out of harm's way. They're also changing their jobs.

Soldiers who once delivered supplies to the front, or fired weapons from exposed positions, are now operating robots remotely. They're modifying machines in workshops and planning missions from behind computer screens.

Several Ukrainian service members, some identified only by their call signs for security reasons, shared their wartime experiences with Business Insider. Traditional infantrymen remain essential, they said, but the war is increasingly robotic.

"Infantrymen were always in short supply in the army before, because it was the hardest job," said Dozer, a UGV regiment commander in the Svoboda Battalion of Ukraine's Rubizh Brigade, identified by his call sign. "Now, thanks to robots, the need for infantrymen has decreased."

Business Insider was on the ground in Ukraine earlier this year, exploring the impact that these robots are having on modern warfare. This account is part of our Robonomics series on the rise of robots and their impact on business, jobs, and everyday life. We've unpacked the investment boom in robotics and have gone inside Amazon's robot-powered warehouse to see if machines were taking human jobs. Now we're looking at the battlefield.

New jobs in robotics

The growing use of ground robots is changing the work of Ukrainian soldiers, shifting some of the physical demands of front-line missions to the preparation, operation, engineering, and maintenance of machines.

Soldiers can spend days getting a robot ready for war.

In specialized workshops, they might take a general-purpose UGV straight from the manufacturer and modify it for whatever mission it needs to execute, adding anti-shrapnel armor, communications equipment, or other gear.

And the engineering is only part of the job.

Before sending a robot into the field, soldiers study aerial reconnaissance, map primary and alternate routes, and choose when to send the machine forward based on reported activity in the sector. These plans are then adapted as the missions unfold.

Kyiv's defense ministry said in early September that the number of logistics and evacuation missions undertaken by robots has grown steadily month over month in 2026, from roughly 7,500 in January to 25,000 in August.

That expanding workload is placing new demands on the soldiers responsible for keeping the machines running.

Dozer said that programming skills and engineering have become increasingly important. He said soldiers now spend a lot of time on computers, designing modifications to stay ahead of Russian engineers, who are developing countermeasures of their own.

"There is much more work that requires thinking, not working with physical strength," he said.

The shift is a striking contrast to the traditional physical demands of infantry work, like carrying heavy equipment and digging trenches.

During missions, operators receive guidance from combatant commands as they sift through real-time intelligence and data. In the aftermath, soldiers sometimes spend hours or days repairing the robots, with the workload depending heavily on whether they suffered a mechanical failure or were damaged in combat.

Ukrainian soldiers have said that in some areas of the front, robots may only survive a few missions. Some get stuck, some lose their connections, and others are destroyed, creating constant demand.

Hundreds of local Ukrainian defense firms, including Ratel Robotics and TAF Industries, are manufacturing UGVs and components.

When Business Insider visited one of Ratel's factories earlier in the year, the company had around 350 workers across its facilities, making robots that cost between $2,000 and $40,000. The CEO said at the time that "most important is to save our soldiers' lives." Though Ukraine uses foreign-made robotic systems, it has built a robust domestic industry churning out these increasingly critical systems.

Production has surged into the thousands as robotic missions become more common, but troops say many more robots and support systems are needed.

"With a sufficient supply of these systems, we can execute a wide range of tasks without putting human lives in harm's way," said Agronom, the commander of a ground robot company in Ukraine's 5th Assault Brigade, identified by his call sign.

The growing reliance on robots didn't happen overnight. It was driven by an increasingly dangerous battlefield that made even routine tasks extremely risky.

A changing battlefield

Early on in the war, Dozer recalled, supply runs were about twice a week.

Vehicles would bring food, fuel, ammunition, and weapons as close to the front as they could. From there, soldiers had to carry the supplies the rest of the way on foot, sometimes for several kilometers. They watched the skies and waited for windows when Russian reconnaissance was lighter before making the trip.

"Many people were injured and killed precisely while delivering provisions," Dozer said. And the danger kept growing as drones began to flood the battlefield in greater numbers.

By the summer of 2023, Russian aerial reconnaissance had become much more pervasive, and movement near the front had, in turn, become "much more dangerous," said Dmytro Davydenko, a staff sergeant in the Svoboda Battalion.

Soldiers could still slip out at night to reach the nearest logistical hub for critical supplies, but more and more infantrymen were staying in their positions, sometimes for weeks at a time, rather than risking movement across a battlefield under growing surveillance.

When the war began, Davydenko's days on the front line were largely spent watching and digging. As an infantryman, he observed Russian positions, deepened the trenches around him, and rebuilt shelters damaged by enemy shelling. Then he would dig some more, sustained by supplies being brought in by fellow soldiers.

The greatest threats were artillery, mines, and mortars, but over time, the battlefield evolved, with the number of uncrewed systems rising from thousands to millions.

"Everything has changed dramatically through a gradual shift," Agronom said.

Cheap FPV, or first-person view, drones have dramatically transformed the battlefield, allowing both sides to surveil the front lines and strike targets ranging from tanks to individual soldiers at a fraction of the cost of traditional weapons. As drones proliferate and adapt to evolving countermeasures, troops increasingly carry detectors, electronic warfare, and, as a last line of defense, shotguns to defend themselves.

By late 2025, the drone-saturated front-line "kill zone," where soldiers and vehicles are easily spotted and targeted, had emerged. Movement within the zone, which now stretches dozens of kilometers on both sides of the line of contact in some areas, is so treacherous that it has pushed Ukraine to prioritize the development and deployment of remotely controlled ground robots.

Agronom's unit started out using ground robots within line-of-sight ranges to more easily transport gear. "In dangerous situations," he said, "this drastically increased mobility, as soldiers no longer had to carry heavy rucksacks to forward positions on foot."

As threats and missions evolved, so did the robots.

Ukrainian engineers are making their ground robots more sophisticated, adding advanced cameras, sensors, and communication links and enabling operators to control them from greater distances. The machines have also become increasingly autonomous and are being paired with aerial drones for highly unusual missions.

For instance, NC13, a strike UGV unit within the Third Assault Brigade of the Third Army Corps, used heavy bomber drones to air-drop robots behind Russian lines during Operation Vivaldi. The tactic, called "Gryphon," was designed to surprise Russian forces and create added pressure in the rear, said unit commander Mykola Zinkevych.

Dozer said that as uncrewed ground vehicles began replacing logisticians on supply runs and evacuation crews on missions to rescue the wounded, it became clear that the conflict had changed.

"We realized that war was becoming a war of robots," he said.

What robots can't replace

There are limits, though, to what robots can do in combat. Infantrymen conduct assault operations, Davydenko said. Soldiers hold back the Russians when poor weather, dense tree lines, and complex urban environments hinder robotic missions. Humans make the judgment calls that a robot can't.

Sam Cranny-Evans, a land warfare expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, said ground robots "augment and complement infantry, rather than fundamentally change their role." UGVs allow soldiers to stay light on their feet, but they can easily fall victim to Russian attacks or get stuck in the surrounding environment.

"Infantry and small drones remain responsible for the bulk of the fighting," Cranny-Evans said. "UGVs are a long way from meaningfully supplanting them."

At war, there are some missions only a soldier can do.

"Human assets are still central, especially in assault actions," Volodymyr Dehtyarov, a public affairs officer in Ukraine's Khartiia Corps, told Business Insider.

But even for soldiers whose jobs haven't been taken over by robots, battlefield demands are changing as new technologies deployed at scale raise the threat level.

With the battlefield under constant drone surveillance, Dehtyarov said, infantrymen often work in small groups and spend long periods in concealed positions like foxholes or dugouts. And conventional forces are increasingly required to have the skills of special operations personnel, such as proficiency with a range of weapons, communications and electronic warfare capabilities, and a knowledge of combat medicine.

"Modern high-tech combined warfare requires a combination of human assets and complicated technology," Dehtyarov said.