• A Ukrainian robot maker says long wars may favor cheap, scalable ground systems, not top-of-the-line armor.
• Expensive tanks and armor are limited and slow to replace, while robots can scale fast.
• Using attritable ground robots for some missions could reduce the strain on traditional vehicle stocks.

Ukraine's experience shows Western militaries how major yearslong conflicts can deplete tanks and armored vehicles and why warfighting robots might matter more in the long run, a Ukrainian ground robot maker told Business Insider.

In a long, high-cost conflict, the number of vehicles needed for tasks ranging from combat to logistics could make relying on expensive armored vehicles like tanks unsustainable, Oleg Fedoryshyn, the director of R&D at Ukrainian robotic systems maker DevDroid, said.

These systems are expensive and slower to produce, making it difficult to replace heavy losses, Fedoryshyn said. However, robots, he said, are "quite cheap" and significantly easier to produce and replace if they're destroyed.

Officials in the US and allied militaries have raised concerns that in a prolonged war — particularly against a near-peer adversary like Russia or China — stockpiles of key munitions, including air defense and precision weapons, could be strained. Likewise, vehicle inventories, especially in the age of cheap drone strikes, could suffer heavy attrition in a protracted conflict.

Fedoryshyn's comments align with broader warnings from Western officials that Ukraine's war has highlighted the need for large volumes of cheaper, attritable systems, essentially inexpensive and expendable mass that militaries can fall back on when more traditional assets are damaged or destroyed.

Ukraine has underscored how a war like its fight against Russia's invasion can demand both sophisticated systems and large numbers of expendable ones.

Ukraine fields masses of cheap weaponry. Many of its low-cost drones fail to reach their targets or have a significant impact, but they are deployed at such a scale that they can still eliminate far more expensive systems. High losses are expected — and generally acceptable — because they are cheap and quick to replace.

Ukraine has a growing fleet of ground robots that are used to evacuate injured soldiers, carry weaponry and heavy goods, lay and remove mines, and attack Russian positions with weaponry. These are also expendable. As Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said this month, the focus is on making cheap and effective systems that Ukraine can scale quickly.

Some Western military leaders have also argued the need to manage costs. US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said last year, as the service reevaluated the Robotic Combat Vehicle program, that "we can't sustain a couple-million-dollar piece of equipment that can be taken out with an $800 drone and munition."

The war has highlighted how vulnerable tanks and armored vehicles can be to artillery and cheap drones. Drones costing hundreds of dollars destroyed tanks worth millions. Tanks have adapted with new armor and tactics but remain at risk.

Ground robots are not a perfect replacement for tanks and armored vehicles, and Western militaries likely wouldn't want to entirely replace those traditional assets. Those vehicles have more power to get over tough terrain, provide far more protection for important assets that need to be brought across the battlefield, and can conduct far larger and more impactful attacks.

But ground robots can take over some roles and keep humans safer in the process. They can attack positions with explosives or mounted weapons such as machine guns and grenade launchers. They can also deliver to the front lines.

The latter use is one in which Ukraine is investing heavily. Fedorov said recently that Ukraine's goal is to use ground robots for 100% of front-line logistics missions.

Tanks have seen mixed performance in Ukraine and reduced use after heavy losses. Ukraine is still making and getting some armored vehicles from partner countries and has requested more tanks, but it is increasingly placing far more emphasis on other types of weaponry.

Constant drone surveillance, limited air cover, and limited numbers of tanks have made Ukraine's armored operations more difficult. The more advanced Western militaries might struggle less, but these factors could still pose a challenge, especially if they find themselves in a protracted slog.

Ukraine is betting big on its robots. Fedorov announced last week that Ukraine will contract 25,000 new robots in the first half of this year, which is double what it contracted for all of last year.

Fedoryshyn said that his company is able to quickly make updates and repairs to its robots, including by having teams that stay near the front lines to quickly fix damaged systems or make rapid upgrades to them. That allows for same-day repairs and even recovery of damaged robots from the battlefield.

• Ukraine's battlefield robot fleet is rapidly growing and is being updated quickly.
• One maker told Business Insider it can make remote fixes in minutes and has staff always near the front.
• It said it is always updating capabilities to stay on top, and the West must learn from that speed.

Ukraine is updating its battlefield robots rapidly and remotely like smartphones.

The use of robots is surging on Ukraine's battlefields, replacing troops in roles from logistics to combat. But the war is changing so fast that, without constant upgrades, the robots can lose their effectiveness.

Oleg Fedoryshyn, director of R&D at Ukrainian robotic systems maker DevDroid, told Business Insider that the company designs its products so that they can be updated as easily as possible, "like mobile phones or operating systems.

"We can update it remotely, and we add some new features, we fix some bugs," he said, sharing that the firm updates the software used by its robots every few weeks and can make remote fixes within minutes, critical amid wartime urgency.

Working to stay relevant

It can design a new update, test it with a brigade, and roll it out across all deployed systems within a week, Fedoryshyn said. The company builds a range of combat robots, along with components that let units mount weapons like grenade launchers and machine guns.

There are limits to remote upgrades, just as there are with smartphones. The technological evolution still requires hardware updates from time to time, a bigger ask, but a necessity to keep up with the pace of change in combat.

They typically do a major modification about every six months, delivering new capabilities, such as more than doubling the distance the robot can travel.

To expedite some processes, the company deploys teams near the front line to fix damaged systems or make rapid hardware upgrades. That allows for same-day turnaround, and teams can even help evacuate disabled robots from the battlefield.

Fedoryshyn compared it to " a warranty, like when you buy a new car," and said it allows soldiers to stay focused on operations.

When the company works on a broken system, it analyzes what failed and whether upgrades are needed: "We think how to do it better."

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been marked by rapid technological change, with battlefield tech constantly evolving. Ukrainian soldiers say equipment can become outdated within weeks or months.

Soldiers often adapt gear in unexpected ways, feeding back into rapid redesigns. DevDroid says it has 24/7 support chats with every unit using its systems. At 3:30 a.m., a unit can ask for help and get a response, Fedoryshyn said.

The idea to arm robots with anti-tank RPGs, now a feature that's being rolled out, first came from soldier feedback, which accelerates the iterative development process.

Lessons in speed

NATO officials have warned that Western industry and militaries need to learn from Ukraine's speed. Adm. Pierre Vandier, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, for instance, previously told Business Insider that the alliance needs Ukraine's "adaptation DNA."

The UK's armed forces minister, Luke Pollard, warned last year that Western military processes are "outdated." In Ukraine, drone tech "iterates every two to three weeks on the front line," he said, arguing that NATO must rethink how it procures weapons.

The speed of innovation has pushed defense manufacturers to design systems that are easier to update, including making them more modular and software-driven. Fedoryshyn said that was key because "it's quite easy to update software, but it's hard to update some hardware."

It's something the US Army increasingly views as critical. Leaders at its new drone school previously told Business Insider that they primarily want to work with companies that make plug-and-play gear that can be updated easily.

Maj. Wolf Amacker, who leads the Army's Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Tactics Branch at the Aviation Center of Excellence, said that when it comes to defense manufacturers, "if whatever they're building isn't modular with other industry partners to work together, then I'm going to go with another industry partner that is."

Robots are a growing part of Ukraine's military. Their usage has surged, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying they carried out more than 22,000 frontline missions in three months.

Ukraine has plans to go much further. Its defense minister this week revealed plans to contract 25,000 new robots in the first half of this year, which is double last year's total, and said that the country's goal is to eventually have 100% of front-line logistics carried out by robots.

Business Insider got exclusive access to see how the US Army's Germany-based 2nd Cavalry Regiment is training for a possible war with Russia.

A group of soldiers known as OPFOR pretends to be the enemy, practicing the same style of trench warfare that has become commonplace in the Russia-Ukraine war.

An Army platoon must traverse mountainous terrain before finding the OPFOR's trench and attacking it.

• Russia has equipped its cheap "Molniya" strike drones with more battery power and better cameras.
• The modifications allow Russia to use these drones for a new purpose — battlefield reconnaissance.
• Moscow doesn't need to rely too heavily on its more expensive reconnaissance drones.

Russia has boosted the range and vision of its fixed-wing Molniya drones, turning cheap, crude aircraft into more capable platforms that can now scout as well as strike in Ukraine.

The upgrades let Moscow lean more on the Molniya ("lightning" in Russian) for battlefield reconnaissance, replacing the pricier surveillance drones like the Supercam and Orlan-10.

Russia has been equipping some of its Molniyas with additional batteries to extend their range, a high-definition camera, and a mesh modem for better communications, Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, an advisor to Ukraine's defense ministry, told Business Insider.

The Molniyas have historically been considered one-way attack drones that carry a warhead and explode on impact. They have been adapted for other missions, though, including carrying smaller first-person-view (FPV) quadcopters, resembling a mothership.

Beskrestnov, a prominent Ukrainian drone warfare expert, said Russia began operating newly modified Molniyas around two months ago and has increasingly used them for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) purposes since then.

The Molniya ISR variant lacks a warhead and is instead equipped with advanced surveillance electronics, including a microcomputer and a rotating camera with a 10-fold optical zoom, according to a US military weapons information portal.

The modified Molniyas are significantly cheaper than the more traditional fixed-wing Supercam S-350 or the Zala Z-16, well-known Russian reconnaissance drones estimated to cost up to $100,000 apiece. The inexpensive Molniyas are made of light materials such as plywood, foam, and aluminum.

Beskrestnov said that Russia can obtain 10-15 Molniyas for the same price. The saturation of Ukrainian interceptor drones over the battlefield has pushed Moscow to opt for cheaper, more expendable assets for reconnaissance and targeting.

He speculated that this shift is driven by increased Ukrainian interceptor activity.

Dimko Zhluktenko, a soldier in Ukraine's 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment, said the modified Molniya drones are relatively easy to manufacture, giving Russia an ideal price for reconnaissance missions. He called these efforts "the war of scale" in a social media post earlier this month.

Neither Russia's defense ministry nor its US embassy responded to a request for comment on the Molniya ISR developments.

Russia and Ukraine have been constantly modifying their drones during the war to try to gain an advantage before the other side either catches up with the technology or develops a defensive countermeasure.

One of the biggest changes is a shift from radio links — easily jammed — to fiber-optic cables that are largely immune to the electronic warfare saturating the battlefield.

These fiber-optic cables have primarily been used to operate smaller FPV drones. However, Russia has begun using them with larger, fixed-wing platforms such as the Molniya.

Russia and Ukraine have taken their innovations a step further with unusual armaments, in some cases equipping drones with air-to-air or surface-to-air missiles to hunt down aircraft.

• Russia has clawed back about 10% of its 2026 oil trade deficit this month, Zelenskyy said.
• Two weeks of war in the Middle East earned Moscow about $10 billion, he said, citing Ukrainian intel.
• The Trump administration is also easing sanctions on Russian oil for about 4 weeks.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that Russia had earned $10 billion in two weeks of the US-Israeli war with Iran.

That's about 10% of what Moscow has lost in the oil trade so far this year, he said in a post on X.

Zelenskyy wrote that Ukrainian intelligence reports indicated that global oil sanctions and Kyiv's strikes on Russian energy infrastructure had pushed Moscow's deficit for 2026 to over $100 billion.

"Now we see they have made around 10 billion over two weeks of the war in the Middle East," Zelenskyy wrote. "This is really dangerous. It gives Putin more confidence that he can continue the war."

"The situation around Iran brings him more money," Zelenskyy added of Russia's president, Vladimir Putin.

His remarks come as oil prices skyrocketed in the weeks after the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28. Both have heavily bombed Iran's oil infrastructure, which produces crude primarily for Asian markets, while Tehran's retaliatory strikes have also damaged energy facilities in the Middle East.

More critically, Tehran is effectively stalling traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane for about a fifth of the world's oil, with a string of attacks on commercial ships plying the waterway.

Russia, meanwhile, stands to gain from rising oil prices as one of the world's largest exporters, though its dominance has been partially stymied by Western sanctions to punish and inhibit its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Trump administration also announced on Friday that it was temporarily easing those sanctions to relieve the global oil supply, allowing trade of Russian crude for roughly four weeks.

In his post, Zelenskyy also warned that easing sanctions would be "helpful" to Putin.

Oil and gas are crucial pillars of the Russian economy, even as it faces global sanctions, and much of the government's revenue comes from taxing these industries.

In January and February, for example, Moscow said it earned about $$10.2 billion in both months from oil and gas revenue, down 47% year-on-year when accounting for currency swings. Its total revenues for the same period were about $58.7 billion, its finance ministry said.

• Western militaries need to study one Ukrainian operation in particular for drone warfare lessons.
• Officials say Operation Spiderweb, which struck dozens of Russian jets, offers key lessons.
• The US Army's drone course director told Business Insider it's "the one event that I teach to the students."

Western militaries are investing heavily in drone warfare after seeing their impact in Ukraine's fight against Russia's invasion. And while it isn't necessary to absorb every lesson, current and former military officials say one major operation is worth studying closely.

Maj. Rachel Martin, director of the US Army's Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course designed to accelerate training on small drone warfare, told Business Insider that the 2025 Operation Spiderweb is "the one event that I teach to the students."

Offensive potential

In the operation, Ukraine smuggled drones into Russia, drove them to positions close to Russian airfields, and launched them at strategically valuable aircraft. The Ukrainian drones hit 41 Russian warplanes and caused an estimated $7 billion in damage.

The strikes showed how arsenals of small, cheap drones can destroy high-value military assets far from the front — and how difficult they are to defend against.

The operation was complex and took roughly a year and a half of planning, but, Martin said, it showed "that a small amount of money could be spent to destroy something at the strategic level," in this case, bombers and other high-dollar aircraft.

It cost Russia billions of dollars when it "is already hurting financially from being in a prolonged war."

Seeing that kind of low-cost attack destroying assets that could take years to replace, she said, "was a big eye-opening experience for the world." It highlighted not only what was possible with attack drones on offense, but also critical vulnerabilities.

Defensive realizations

The Ukrainian operation sparked a realization in the West about the need for significantly more protection at air bases, especially those hosting essential mission tools, such as nuclear deterrence elements.

Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara, the deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration for the US Air Force, said of the operation last year that "disruptive" technologies like the drones seen in the Ukraine war "will have big implications not just for our bomber force or our nuclear force but really any critical infrastructure."

"We have counter-drone capabilities at these bases. Do we need to continue to modernize? Do we need to accelerate?" he said. "Yeah, absolutely, all that."

The majority of the most strategic US air assets are based inside the continental US. American airpower also depends heavily on warplanes stationed at air bases around the world. Defending against drones has proven challenging at both home and abroad, as the Tower 22 disaster and a number of domestic incidents have highlighted.

European air bases have likewise grappled with the challenge of drones, making the lessons of Operation Spiderweb particularly poignant.

Retired Air Marshal Greg Bagwell, who spent 36 years in the British Royal Air Force and served as its director of joint warfare, said last month that Operation Spiderweb holds key lessons that NATO allies need to learn.

When it comes to modern drone warfare, the West has more to learn from operations like Spiderweb than from day-to-day front-line drone fighting, he said at the UK think tank Chatham House. The West doesn't necessarily need to engage in heavy quadcopter warfare at the front when it has artillery and substantial airpower.

"The lessons that we need to learn are more from Operation Spiderweb, where Ukraine employed these drones in a much more sophisticated way and really did start to take out some significant targets," Bagwell said. That operation had a high-level strategic effect on a stronger adversary for a comparatively lower cost. It's asymmetric warfare that the West can't ignore.

Picking up lessons from the war

The US is using drone warfare in ways beyond what Spiderweb demonstrated, drawing on other lessons from the war. In its war with Iran that started last month, it has used drones to attack Iranian targets, including the new one-way attack LUCAS drones.

It's also still employing traditional drone tactics, using platforms like the uncrewed strike and reconnaissance drone MQ-9 Reaper.

The Army's new drone course is just one of the many ways that it is advancing its drone warfare capabilities, along with other moves like plans to buy at least a million drones in the next two or so years. Allies across NATO are taking similar steps.

Martin said their power is undeniable, and the course itself was created because the Army could see that it was behind in small drone warfare and needed to fix that. But the US is not in the same existential fight that Ukraine is, nor is it facing the same weapons shortages.

Drones have kept Ukraine in the fight against Russia even as other weapons ran out. They haven't been decisive, though, indicating that deep stocks of traditional and advanced weaponry still matter.

The US Army course teaches soldiers that drones aren't always the right weapon.

Bagwell also cautioned against leaning too heavily on drones. He said that drones have been "hugely useful" for Ukraine, but "these have not won the war for either side."

He said that Ukraine has "had to adapt and fight the way they can only fight, and I applaud them for what they have done. But there is a question for us in the West as to whether that is the way we want to fight."