‘Like the movies’: How Ukraine’s ground robots are changing rules of war
They carry ammunition, can conduct kamikaze missions and have shown they can capture enemy positions. Ternopil, Ukraine – A ground robot carrying ammunition and resembling
They carry ammunition, can conduct kamikaze missions and have shown they can capture enemy positions. Ternopil, Ukraine – A ground robot carrying ammunition and resembling a real-life cousin of Wall-E, the 2008 Pixar cartoon’s rusty protagonist, got stuck late one night in a trench in northeastern Ukraine. Named Murakha (ant in Ukrainian), the robot was a bit more than a metre high, but had a large clearance to trudge across rugged terrain, bombed-out streets, mud, sleet or snow on tank-like tracks at up to 12km (7.5 miles) per hour. Its pilots were hidden in a bunker tens of kilometres away from the stuck robot, slouched in chairs or pacing nervously next to a screen showing grainy, barely visible footage from Murakha’s camera. Sending a human rescue team to the front-line area was deemed too dangerous, an officer in charge of planning robotic missions said. Instead, the pilots managed to get another Murakha to pull the first one out with a rope. “It was like they show in movies – we conquered a planet, everyone was happy and smiling,” the officer, who only identified himself by his call sign, Maska (The Mask), told Al Jazeera. He withheld his name and details of service in accordance with wartime protocol. “You get an ecstatic pleasure understanding your job was not in vain,” he said, describing other missions near the besieged eastern city of Pokrovsk that required hours of planning and lasted mere minutes because of fire from omnipresent Russian drones. “Our work helps save many lives,” he said. Murakha and its siblings are manufactured by Robotic Complexes, a company in the western city of Ternopil, as well as by more than 200 startups all over Ukraine.
They’re part of a wider technological revolution that eliminates the traditional notion of warfare as man-to-man combat and replaces humans on the front line amid Ukraine’s dire desertion and conscription crisis. “In 2022, it was a war of people; today people fight robots,” Maska said, referring to the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, when he fought and nearly died as an infantryman. These days, his team painstakingly plans each mission considering factors such as temperature, wind direction, curvature of slopes and even the depth of water in puddles. While aerial drones dominate the sky and news reports, ground robots are less visible and outspoken – but no less essential. They’re harder to spot and destroy than vehicles with combustion engines because their electric engines make them less visible to thermal detection. Their battery life is longer than that of aerial drones. Their payload is much heavier and bulkier. And the bang in an explosives-laden kamikaze robot is way bigger. In April, for the first time in warfare history, two ground robots captured a Russian position in the northeastern Kharkiv region. The first robot blew up the entrance into a bunker; the second one blocked it and revealed its operators: two horrified Russian soldiers scribbling a surrender note. “The future is already on the front line, and Ukraine is building it,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said about the operation. Each Murakha is equipped with cameras, infrared lighters, a GPS module or a Starlink, and its pilots use frequency-hopping algorithms that avoid signal jamming. It can deliver hundreds of kilogrammes of ammunition, medical supplies or food, draw a cart with more cargo or carry radio antennas that widen the operational horizon for drones.
The BriefWire