In Ukraine, a New Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born

As the war grinds on, sophisticated Russian defenses have pushed Ukraine to develop a frightening new weapon: semiautonomous killing machines.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drones-war-russia.html

https://archive.ph/7m56k


Bumblebee attack drones at a combat testing range outside Kharkiv, Ukraine. Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times



On a warm morning a few months ago, Lipa, a Ukrainian drone pilot, flew a small gray quadcopter over the ravaged fields near Borysivka, a tiny occupied village abutting the Russian border. A surveillance drone had spotted signs that an enemy drone team had moved into abandoned warehouses at the village’s edge. Lipa and his navigator, Bober, intended to kill the team or drive it off. Another pilot had twice tried hitting the place with standard kamikaze quadcopters, which are susceptible to radio-wave jamming that can disrupt the communication link between pilot and drone, causing weapons to crash. Russian jammers stopped them. Lipa had been assigned the third try but this time with a Bumblebee, an unusual drone provided by a secretive venture led by Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google and one of the world’s wealthiest men.

Bober sat beside Lipa as he oriented for an attack run. From high over Borysivka, one of the Bumblebee’s two airborne cameras focused on a particular building’s eastern side. Bober checked the imagery, then a digital map, and agreed: They had found the target. “Locked in,” Lipa said. With his right hand, Lipa toggled a switch, unleashing the drone from human control. Powered by artificial intelligence, the Bumblebee swept down without further external guidance. As it descended, it lost signal connection with Lipa and Bober. This did not matter: It continued its attack free of their command. Its sensors and software remained focused on the building and adjusted heading and speed independently.

Another drone livestreamed the result: The Bumblebee smacked into an exterior wall and exploded. Whether Russian soldiers were harmed was unclear, but a semiautonomous drone had hit where human-piloted drones missed, rendering the position untenable. “They will change their location now,” Lipa said. (Per Ukrainian security rules, soldiers are referred to by their first name or call sign.) Throughout 2025 in the war between Russia and Ukraine, in largely unseen and unheralded moments like the warehouse strike in Borysivka, the era of killer robots has begun to take shape on the battlefield. Across the roughly 800-mile front and over the airspace of both nations, drones with newly developed autonomous features are now in daily combat use.

By last spring, Bumblebees launched from Ukrainian positions had carried out more than 1,000 combat flights against Russian targets, according to a manufacturer’s pamphlet extolling the weapon’s capabilities. Pilots say they have flown thousands more since. Bumblebee’s introduction raised immediate alarms in the Kremlin’s military circles, according to two Russian technical intelligence reports. One, based on dissection of a damaged Bumblebee collected along the front, described a mystery drone with chipsets and a motherboard “of the highest quality, matching the level of the world’s leading microelectronics manufacturers.” The report noted the sort of deficiencies expected of a prototype but ended with an ominous forecast: “Despite current limitations,” it declared, “the technology will demonstrate its effectiveness” and its range of uses “will continue to expand.”

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