Since 13th December 2024, it appeared that Russia is losing the war in Ukraine even with the support of North Korean troops in the Kursk Region of Russia. Russia has begged North Korea for its military support. Ukraine has pushed back Russian military forces with remote-controlled vehicles mounted with machine guns and kamikaze drones. Ukraine mounted its first robot-only assault on a Russian position pushing back military forces despite being heavily outnumbered.

After nearly three years of war, Ukraine is arguably the world’s leader in military robotics. But the Ukrainians’ innovation is, in part, an answer to its desperation—that is, its struggles to recruit enough human soldiers to match the Russians person-for-person. Russia has made Ukraine the world’s leader in military robotics because military robots have come to be useful and efficient on the war front.

I am talking about dozens of units of robotic and unmanned equipment simultaneously on a small section of the front,” a spokesperson for the 13th National Guard Brigade of Ukraine has explained robotic usefulness on the war front.

That the 13th National Guard Brigade even needed to replace all of the human beings in a ground assault speaks to how few people the brigade has compared to the Russian units it’s fighting. The 13th National Guard Brigade defends a five-mile stretch of the front line around the town of Hlyboke, just south of the Ukraine-Russia border. It’s holding back a force of no fewer than four Russian regiments.

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That’s no more than 2,000 Ukrainians versus 6,000 or so Russians. The manpower ratio is roughly the same all along the 800-mile front line of Russia’s 34-month wider war on Ukraine. Russian troops still greatly outnumber Ukrainian troops, despite the Russians suffering around twice as many casualties as the Ukrainians since February 2022.

The Ukrainian robotic military operation involved remote-controlled flying surveillance and mine-laying drones, one-way explosive robots on the ground and in the air as well as gun-armed ground ’bots. This is the first robotic army infantry that Ukraine has introduced to the world.

Volodymyr Dehtiarov, a representative for Ukraine’s Khartiia Brigade, said: “We are talking about dozens of units of robotic and unmanned equipment simultaneously on a small section of the front.”

With Kyiv struggling to overcome crippling manpower shortages, its armed forces have often placed faith in experimental armed robots in an attempt to turn the tide of the war. In some areas of the battlefield, Russia has a three-to-one advantage in manpower.

But the assault by the 13th National Guard Brigade is the first example of a robot-only combined-arms manoeuvre. The brigade is responsible for defending a five-mile stretch of the frontline near Hlyboke, a Russian-held town in the Kharkiv region, about five miles south of the border.

The problem, of course, is that while robots are adept at surveilling and attacking, they’re terrible at holding. To hold ground, armies put infantry in trenches. They sit, watch, wait and call for reinforcements when the enemy attacks. It’s a tedious, taxing duty that requires constant vigilance.

Constant vigilance is difficult when a human operator is remotely observing the battlefield through the sensors of a maintenance-hungry ground robot.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said there have been “significant” improvements in supplies to the front line by Kyiv’s partners. “There have been significant improvements in partner supplies to the frontline, with an increase in deliveries under support packages,” Zelenskyy said on Monday on X, following a meeting with the country’s military leadership.

Zelenskyy also said that the meeting provided a detailed assessment of the situation on the front line, giving high priority, particularly to the Pokrovsk, Kurakhove, Toretsk, and Kupiansk fronts in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions. He added that a separate report was made concerning Ukraine’s ongoing incursion in Russia’s border region of Kursk.

In August, Ukrainian forces entered the Kursk region near the town of Sudzha, approximately 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) from the border, to create a “buffer zone” to protect against cross-border attacks from Russia.

Inwalomhe Donald writes via inwalomhe.donald@yahoo.com