‘Like the movies’: How Ukraine’s ground robots are changing rules of war 

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.

And if equipped with an evacuation module that is bullet-, sound- and vibration-proof, has polymer armor, heating, ventilation and a first aid kit, a Murakha can bring home the most valuable cargo: a wounded soldier.

“To be honest, [the module] is a bit coffin-like, but otherwise it was hard to make the box look different,” says Ihor Chaikivsky, the man behind Murakha.

With a mop of auburn hair and a week-old stubble, Chaikivsky is a seasoned businessman who used to focus on agriculture and started manufacturing ground robots to save lives, including his own.

“The primary goal behind starting the business was actually to protect people from the war,” he told Al Jazeera in one of his company’s 11 “decentralised” facilities that are spread around the Ternopil region to minimise damage in case of a Russian missile attack. “I had no desire to go to war. I still have no such desire.”

And those who did pioneered a bottom-up culture of innovations that changed the Ukrainian army’s Soviet-era mentality and approach to new technologies.

Among the volunteers or mobilised men were business owners, software engineers, ship captains and cameramen who used drones with cameras in their work and decided to battle-test them, he said.

Most had no military backgrounds, were afraid to die and pestered their commanders with new ideas, making grassroots innovations an axiom.

“Only proximity to death spurred us to take action to gain an advantage in this war,” Chaikivsky said. “We’ve become, perhaps, the world’s only army where commands are acted upon very quickly, moving from the bottom up.”

In Russia, despite its bigger population, financial resources and technological base, such an approach didn’t take root, slowing down the diversity of innovations and their implementation.

“Clearly, their culture, mentality, political and corruption practices won’t let them do this very quickly or effectively, though I wouldn’t underestimate their technological capabilities,” Chaikivsky said.

The approach seems to be working well at Robotic Complexes.

Its robots are designed to have as few welded details as possible to make front-line repairs quick. Feedback from servicemen is fast, and so are the adjustments they ask for.

The mushrooming of companies manufacturing ground robots fits into Ukraine’s conception of rapid development of technological solutions that require little manpower on the battlefield.

“As soon as elements of such technologies emerge, they have to be scaled up and implemented,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera.

But some servicemen decry the robots’ vulnerability.

“They’re an easy target for drones,” a serviceman with the Russian Volunteer Corps, a military unit of Russian nationals who fight for Ukraine, told Al Jazeera, withholding his name for security purposes.

“They’re effective when they deliver food and ammo, but not so good for evacuating the wounded,” he said.