Lethal Autonomy: How Russia and Ukraine Are Pioneering AI-Driven Warfare

Drones with some autonomous capabilities are already being deployed at scale by Russia and Ukraine. Tetiana Bubynets collapsed on the asphalt after a Russian drone exploded at a gas station in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia. Despite the violent shockwave and blast of drone shrapnel produced by the attack on July 6, the 18-year-old accounting student had no visible wounds except for a nosebleed. She was rushed to hospital and pronounced dead shortly after, alongside two other civilians, aged 41 and 48.

One of her lecturers, Tetiana Melikhova of Zaporizhzhia National University, said Bubynets was an only child and that her mother lost the meaning of life after she died. “She couldn’t speak. At the funeral, she just lay on the coffin; she couldn’t let her child go,” Melikhova told Al Jazeera. The strike that killed Bubynets was the first recorded case of Russia’s use of a fully autonomous attack drone powered by artificial intelligence (AI), according to a New York Times analysis.

While drone strikes have hammered Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian officials who examined the wreckage found the unmanned vehicle to be unlike others. In place of an antenna, it featured an AI-powered minicomputer sold commercially by US technology company Nvidia, which rendered it capable of directing itself to the type of target it was programmed to spot – likely propane tanks in this case – lock on to it and proceed to strike.

AI-powered drones are the tip of the iceberg as Russia and Ukraine race towards boosting tech infrastructure aimed at coordinating reconnaissance and attack, according to analysts. Marina Miron, a researcher at the defence studies department at King’s College London, noted that these unified battlefield management systems act like a central command. Referred to as reconnaissance-strike architecture, they track the location of friendly forces and identify enemy positions while using AI to instantly process massive amounts of data.

Ukraine is known to be developing its system, named DELTA. Following operational trials in late 2025, Russia has been rolling out its version, the Svod Tactical Situational Awareness Complex, to front-line units. Serhiy Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian Ministry of Defence adviser on loitering munitions known by his callsign Flash, stated that navigation, target searches, and attacks will eventually become fully autonomous.

Heorhii Volkov, commander of Ukraine’s Yasni Ochi drone strike unit, explained that current autonomy is mostly used in the final phase of long-distance strikes where first-person view (FPV) drones might lose radio connection due to electronic warfare. Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of Ukrainian technology company The Fourth Law, added that the race is focused on making autonomy reliable, affordable, and deployable at scale to overcome electronic warfare constraints.

However, Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), highlighted the dangers of relying on imperfect technology. Because low-quality FPV drone cameras struggle to distinguish between a civilian and a military person, deploying autonomous systems delegates critical targeting choices to algorithms that lack human contextual understanding.