Opinion: Russia-Ukraine war accelerates race toward fully autonomous drones
The conflict has pushed both Russia and Ukraine to add AI‑driven autonomy to their drone fleets. Since the war began in February 2022, each side has moved from simple one‑way attack drones to platforms that can recognize targets, navigate and guide themselves in the final flight phase. In November 2025 a Ukrainian first‑person‑view drone used an AI‑assisted guidance system to strike a probable…
Key points
- Russia fielded at least one fully autonomous V2U UAV in early 2025, using an Nvidia computer for AI decision‑making.
- Ukrainian drones employed AI‑guided final‑phase targeting in November 2025, striking a tank after operator communications were lost.
- Experts caution that autonomous swarms of hundreds‑to‑thousands could outpace human‑control safeguards and raise ethical issues.
Experts warn that scaling to hundreds or thousands of such drones could outpace existing human‑in‑the‑loop safeguards, raising serious ethical and legal concerns about proportionality, civilian protection and accountability in future warfare.
Russia-Ukraine war is accelerating the dangerous race toward fully autonomous drones
theconversation.com · 23 September 2026
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