On a stage in Lviv, in front of a standing-room crowd of self-described tech nerds, Ukraine's former defence minister played a short video of what he wants the next phase of the war to look like: a mix of two-legged and crab-like machines skittering across a barren front line, doing the jobs that still get soldiers killed. Then Mykhailo Fedorov, 35, told the room that Ukraine needs a "new Manhattan Project," and that its target was no longer drones but robots that walk.
Fedorov is the man who oversaw Ukraine's rapid drone build-out as defence minister, turning cheap quadcopters into one of the war's defining weapons. His new initiative, announced at the IT Arena conference on 26 September and called the Army of Robots, aims to do the same thing again on the ground. The pitch is to pool engineers, startups, investors and military units into a single ecosystem, and to move fast. He wants a first confirmed battlefield result from a humanoid-like robot within six months, and within a year an assault in which robots take the most dangerous part of a mission with no infantry alongside them. "We want to eventually substitute our infantry with these robots," he told Defense News.
The timeline is the giveaway that this is a wartime programme, not a research project. Six months leaves no room for ground-up R&D, so Fedorov says he will start by backing companies whose weapons have already been tested and shown some market viability. The near-term ambitions are narrow and concrete: a robot that can reload a machine gun, swap the batteries in autonomous sensors, or launch a drone. He expects a first working prototype in roughly a month.
The number that matters most is the price. Ready-made foreign humanoids run between $40,000 and $70,000, far too expensive to buy in the tens of thousands Ukraine would need. Fedorov wants machines in the $10,000 to $20,000 range, and he is explicit that these will not be the polished, general-purpose humanoids that American and Chinese firms demo in glossy videos. He wants simple machines, assigned a handful of tasks and produced in bulk. The whole logic of a humanoid robot, usually sold as a warehouse worker or a home helper, gets inverted here: the point is not that it is impressive, but that it is cheap enough to lose.
Ukraine is not starting from nothing. Its forces already field ground robots for logistics, casualty evacuation, mine clearance and attacks, though most are remote-controlled rather than autonomous. The grim driver is the modern front itself, where constant drone surveillance means a soldier spotted in the open can be hunted down within minutes. The case for sending a machine instead almost makes itself.
Whether a country often described as one of Europe's poorest can hit these targets is a fair question, and plenty in the audience will have filed the vision under wishful thinking. But Russia underestimated Ukraine's drone improvisation once already. Fedorov's framing is that whoever reinvents the front line first wins the next cycle of the war, and he would rather it be Kyiv than Moscow's larger industrial base. The open question is not whether cheap robot soldiers are coming, but who fields them first, and what a $10,000 price tag on a disposable fighter does to the rest of the world's thinking about war.