In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that his forces had, for the first time in the history of warfare, seized an enemy position using only unmanned systems. No infantry. No human soldiers entering the contested ground. Drones and ground robots identified the target, suppressed defensive fire, and captured the position without a single Ukrainian casualty. The claim has not been independently verified in detail, and Ukraine’s military has declined to provide specifics. But the company at the centre of the operation, a Ukrainian-British defence technology startup called UFORCE, has conducted more than 150,000 combat missions since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, achieved unicorn status with a valuation exceeding one billion dollars, and is now scaling production from a discreet London headquarters designed, the company says, to protect it from Russian sabotage. The age of unmanned warfare is no longer a conference-circuit prediction. It is a line item on a defence contractor’s balance sheet.

The company

UFORCE was formed through the merger of nine Ukrainian defence companies that had been collaborating during the war. It is led by Oleg Rogynskyy, the former founder of People.ai, and Oleksii Honcharuk, a former prime minister of Ukraine. The company develops air, sea, and land drones, employs more than 1,000 engineers, developers, and operators across six European countries, and reported 450 per cent booking growth in 2025. In March, it raised 50 million dollars at a valuation exceeding one billion dollars, becoming Ukraine’s first defence technology unicorn. Ukraine has become the world’s testing ground for military robots, and UFORCE is the company that has most effectively converted that testing ground into a commercial enterprise.

The product portfolio spans the domains of the conflict. UFORCE’s MAGURA maritime drones have struck more than 12 Russian warships in the Black Sea, including the first recorded instance of an uncrewed surface vessel shooting down a manned helicopter and fighter jet. Its Nemesis strike drones conduct precision attacks. Its ground-based systems use software-assisted targeting to engage enemy positions. The company also develops counter-drone technology and battlefield management software that coordinates operations across multiple unmanned platforms simultaneously. The 150,000 combat missions figure encompasses air, sea, and land operations conducted since 2022, a scale of deployment that no Western defence technology company, including the much larger and better-funded Anduril Industries, has matched in live combat.

The operation

Zelensky’s April video showcased a range of Ukrainian-developed robotic weapons systems including Ratel, TerMIT, Ardal, Rys, Zmiy, Protector, and Volia ground robots, which have collectively conducted more than 22,000 missions in just three months. The president was explicit about the significance: unmanned systems had taken territory that would have cost human lives to capture. Rhiannon Padley, UFORCE’s UK director of strategic partnerships, would not comment on the specific operation shown in Zelensky’s video but confirmed that the company’s air, land, and sea drones are currently being used in active combat operations. She added that robots fighting robots was becoming more common and predicted that unmanned systems would eventually outnumber human soldiers on the battlefield.

Russia is fielding its own unmanned ground systems, deploying robots designed to deliver explosives into Ukrainian positions. Both sides are locked in an arms race in which the development cycle has compressed from years to weeks, with field modifications, software updates, and entirely new platform designs iterating at a pace that traditional defence procurement processes were never designed to accommodate. The surge in European defence stocks reflects the broader market’s recognition that military technology is shifting from hardware platforms built over decades to software-defined systems iterated in months, and that the companies building those systems look more like tech startups than like BAE Systems or Lockheed Martin.

The industry

UFORCE is part of a generation of so-called neo-prime defence companies challenging the established contractors. Anduril Industries, founded by Oculus VR co-creator Palmer Luckey, conducted its first test flight of an autonomous fighter jet in February, has secured billions in US military contracts, and is building Arsenal-1, a one billion dollar manufacturing facility in Ohio targeting 5 million square feet of production capacity. Ukrainian drone startups are increasingly seeking to convert wartime technology into dual-use commercial applications, and the broader European defence technology sector raised 2.3 billion euros in 2025, more than double the figure for 2024, with German startups capturing 90 per cent of the continent’s defence technology investment in the first half of the year.

Europe’s military AI capabilities are being shaped by alliances between AI labs and defence specialists, such as the partnership between Helsing, a Munich-based military AI company valued at 12 billion euros, and Mistral, the French foundation model developer. The convergence of AI and defence has accelerated a debate that the Ukraine conflict has made unavoidable. While most drones on both sides are still operated remotely by human pilots, the trajectory is toward increasing autonomy. Anduril has stated that some of its systems can autonomously complete the final phase of an attack. In January, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that the country needs to become an “AI-first warfighting force.” China is expanding its own AI-enabled military systems. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in November 2025 with 156 states in favour calling for negotiations on autonomous weapons, but no binding framework has emerged.

The question

The ethical implications of autonomous weapons systems have followed the technology from conference rooms into combat zones. Patrick Wilcken of Amnesty International has warned that delegating life-and-death decisions to machines poses profound ethical and human rights risks, particularly around accountability when autonomous systems cause civilian casualties. Defence manufacturers argue that keeping a human in the loop addresses such concerns and that computing reduces errors in what the military calls the kill chain. “Humans need rest and food, and under combat conditions those needs aren’t always met,” said Rich Drake, Anduril’s UK general manager. The argument is pragmatic: machines do not suffer fatigue, fear, or the cognitive degradation that leads to errors under fire. The counterargument is moral: the decision to take a life should not be optimised for efficiency.

Ukraine’s emergence as a global defence technology leader has been driven by necessity rather than choice. A country fighting for survival against a larger adversary has innovated faster than any peacetime research programme could, producing drone production capacity that scaled from 5,000 units in 2022 to four million by the end of 2024. UFORCE’s billion-dollar valuation is the financial expression of that innovation. But the technology being forged in Ukraine will not stay in Ukraine. The company operates across six European countries and is positioning itself for export markets. The unmanned systems that have proven their effectiveness against Russian forces will be offered to other militaries, other conflicts, and other contexts in which the calculus of human risk makes robotic warfare not just possible but, for the governments making the decisions, preferable. Melanie Sisson of the Brookings Institution described Ukraine as a major teacher in the future of national defence. The lesson it is teaching is that the battlefield of the near future will have more robots than soldiers. The companies building those robots are already profitable, already scaling, and already worth a billion dollars.