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 drone shrapnel explosion produced by the July 6 attack, the 18-year-old accounting student had no visible injuries except a nosebleed. 48. One of her professors, Tetiana Melikhova of Zaporizhzhia National University, said that Bubynets was an only child and that her mother “lost the meaning of life” after her death. “He couldn’t speak. At the funeral, he just lay down in the coffin; he couldn’t let his son go,” Melikhova told Al Jazeera. The attack 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 attacks have hit Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian officials who examined the wreckage found that the unmanned vehicle did not look like the others. Instead of an antenna, it featured an AI-powered minicomputer sold commercially by American technology company Nvidia, allowing it to home in on the type of target it was programmed to lock onto (likely propane tanks in this case). and proceed to attack. AI-powered drones are the tip of the iceberg as Russia and Ukraine rush to boost technological infrastructure aimed at coordinating reconnaissance and strike, analysts say. “It’s not about a drone having AI and then seeing something and being surprised,” said Marina Miron, a researcher in the defense studies department at King’s College London. “Rather, it is the drone that sees something, communicates with a software complex that knows how to map the GPS coordinates onto a live battlefield map, and notifies the nearest artillery unit.” Known as attack reconnaissance architecture, these unified battlefield management systems act as a central command. They track the location of friendly forces and identify enemy positions. AI acts as an accelerator, instantly processing massive amounts of data collected through sensors on drones or any other military product, including interceptor missiles or artillery units. The tactical advantage on the battlefield comes from the system’s ability to compress the kill chain, which means coordinating and distributing intelligence to military assets on the ground to find, track and destroy targets in a matter of minutes. In such an ecosystem, AI-powered automated drones are just pieces of a larger ecosystem. puzzle. Ukraine is known to be developing its system, which it called DELTA. Following operational testing in late 2025, Russia has been deploying its version, the Svod Tactical Situational Awareness Complex, to frontline units. Both sides claim that once battlefield data is processed, a decision support system (DSS) presents the military commander with options to choose from, keeping a human being in the decision-making loop, Miron said. “Of course, it is impossible to know to what extent this is true,” he added. Even if humans retained the authority to make final decisions, research has shown that AI systems subtly shape choices and predetermine outcomes. “Under time and pressure, commanders often do what artificial intelligence suggests,” said Miron, whose research focuses on military artificial intelligence and autonomous and remotely piloted systems. Flash callsign. “That’s what it will all come to,” he posted on his Telegram channel on July 1. “Navigation, targeting and attacks will be completely autonomous.” Drones with some autonomous capabilities are already being deployed on a large scale. Heorhii Volkov, commander of Ukraine’s Yasni Ochi drone strike unit, said it is currently mainly used in the final phase of long-distance strikes, where first-person view (FPV) drones are likely to lose radio connection due to electronic warfare. or the curvature of the Earth. The use of AI in so-called last mile operations solves this problem on the battlefield. If the signal is lost, an AI-integrated onboard module takes full control of the unmanned vehicle, autonomously locks on to the target and completes the attack. Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of Ukrainian technology company The Fourth Law, which develops AI-powered autonomy software for unmanned vehicles, said Russia and Ukraine were working to deploy a broader range of autonomous systems. “This is not simply a race to demonstrate a fully autonomous drone. It is a race to make autonomy reliable, affordable and deployable at scale,” Azhnyuk told Al Jazeera. “Electronic warfare, increasingly longer combat distances and the growing number of drones are making human-controlled systems less sufficient. Autonomy solves exactly these limitations.” Azhnyuk believes autonomy will be a game-changer in the next six to 12 months. “The decisive advantage will belong to the side that can deploy reliable autonomy in tens or hundreds of thousands of systems, not just demonstrate it in prototypes,” he said. Kateryna Bondar, a senior researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), pointed out the dangers of AI’s reliance on algorithms. “The system doesn’t understand what it’s doing; it just follows the algorithm and the rules that people created,” said Bondar, who works at CSIS’s Wadhwani AI Center. “AI must be trained to recognize targets and attack them,” but writing code that distinguishes between a bus and a tank is easier than between a Russian and a Ukrainian soldier. Additionally, cost-effective FPV drones have low-quality cameras and their resolution can be further reduced due to adverse atmospheric conditions. Therefore, military units using autonomous systems “delegate the decision to a very imperfect technology that cannot distinguish between a civilian and a military person, combatant or non-combatant,” Bondar said. “Who makes a decision and who bears responsibility for errors and mistakes.”
