A remotely operated ground robot of Ukraine’s 57th Motorized Brigade during exercises in 2026 (illustrative; not part of Army of Robots). Image: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0, cropped
The man who built Ukraine’s drone army now wants AI-driven humanoid robots on the front line, and he has given himself six months. Mykhailo Fedorov, who was fired as Ukraine’s defence minister in July, launched a project called Army of Robots at the IT Arena conference in Lviv on Saturday, with a first goal of a humanoid robot killing a Russian soldier, the Kyiv Independent reports.
What Fedorov announced
Fedorov opened his talk with a simple line:
We are launching an army of robots.
Mykhailo Fedorov, speaking at IT Arena in Lviv
He set two deadlines, according to Ukrainska Pravda. Within six months, a humanoid robot should kill its first enemy soldier. Within 12 months, the project wants to carry out an operation using only robots and drones, with the machines coordinating through shared algorithms rather than a human steering each one.
Alongside the humanoids, which Ukrainska Pravda says are meant to operate autonomously, the project covers aerial drones, ground robots, AI-based strike systems and low-cost interceptor missiles.
The project’s website opens with the line “We are here to replace people with robots on the battlefield and save lives.” Fedorov described it as an ecosystem rather than a single company: it will invest in defence tech firms, run its own projects, build research capacity and test systems with the military. He said the humanoids would start with simple jobs, such as reloading a machine gun, swapping a battery or installing a sensor, before moving on to reconnaissance, carrying ammunition, laying and clearing mines and evacuating the wounded.
Physical AI goes to war
Fedorov pitched the project as a push into physical AI, the branch of AI that lets machines see, plan and act in the real world. It’s the same technology Tesla is betting on for Optimus, now aimed at the battlefield, and he is openly asking for foreign money and talent to build it. As dev.ua reported, he told the audience:
Russia will stop only when we can break its backbone and take away all opportunities to finance the war. To do this, we need a new leap, which requires the involvement of Western capital, the best engineers in the world and private initiatives.
Mykhailo Fedorov
Who is paying for it is still unclear. Ukrainska Pravda says a large private technology company will lead development but hasn’t been named, and Fedorov’s press team declined to tell the Kyiv Independent which organisation is behind it. Earlier this month Fedorov announced a separate defence tech company, with Palantir CEO Alex Karp as lead investor in a personal capacity.
The robots in the video aren’t real yet
The launch video shows humanoids, dog-like and spider-like walkers and armed robot carts, but every machine in it is an AI-generated render, not footage of working hardware, DroneXL and the Kyiv Independent note. The ground robots Ukraine uses today, like the one pictured above, are mostly driven remotely by an operator over a Starlink link rather than acting on their own.
Closing that gap is mostly an AI problem. A robot that fights on its own has to recognise what it’s looking at, move over broken ground, handle objects with its hands and decide what to do next, all without a person at the controls and often without a reliable connection.
That leaves a big gap between the pitch and the battlefield. Even the best-funded humanoid makers are still struggling with basic manual work: Tesla, which wants to mass-produce its Optimus humanoid, is still wrestling with the robot’s hands and with teaching it new jobs.
Fedorov’s track record
Fedorov has made this kind of bet before. As minister of digital transformation he launched the Army of Drones programme in 2022 and set up Brave1, the government’s defence tech hub, both widely credited with making Ukraine a leader in drone warfare. President Volodymyr Zelensky removed him as defence minister on July 15 after six months in the job, a decision that set off weeks of protests calling for him to be reinstated. Army of Robots runs outside government.
Why it matters
This is one of the most explicit public goals yet for an AI-controlled robot that kills in combat, and it comes from someone with a record of scaling new military technology quickly. Whether a humanoid can do that within six months is doubtful, but the target puts armed autonomous machines, and the question of how much a human stays in control of AI weapons, firmly on the agenda.
Sources: Kyiv Independent, Ukrainska Pravda, dev.ua, DroneXL.
