The ousted defense minister has found American capital for his procurement-and-data model while Kyiv's own export channel has issued no permits and charges 20% to 30% up front.
Ukraine has logged more than 100,000 unmanned ground vehicle missions this year, and its procurement agency has just started buying whole classes of ground robots to ministry-written specifications.
Ukraine's Defence Ministry says more than 70 AI and computer-vision systems already strike targets and that every frontline drone should carry machine vision, with terminal guidance that holds a target after Russian jamming cuts the link.
The alliance wants machines to compress the sensor-to-shooter timeline while humans retain control over lethal engagements.
Fedorov stripped vendor selection from Ukraine's General Staff and ranked suppliers on combat data. Zelenskyy removed him on July 15 after the commander-in-chief objected, and the succession has already changed twice.
Vepr is a Ukrainian tracked ground robot for frontline logistics and casualty evacuation — 350 kg of cargo or two wounded, ~40 km per charge, plus remote demining, recovery and one-way strike roles. Codified by Ukraine's MoD in June 2026 after two years on the front.
Ukraine's Brave1 pulled the months-old YC startup to Kyiv before it even held an export license, a measure of how much front-line demand now rides on the counter-drone integration layer.
On July 2, Airbus co-led Quantum Systems' $1.2B round and became Brave1's first Western partner. Europe's old primes are buying the defense-tech boom, not fighting it.
Kyiv opened a grant contest for domestic humanoid robots, extending a ground-robot buildout on track to contract 25,000 uncrewed vehicles in the first half of 2026.
Ukraine's Toloka TLK-150 is a small semi-submersible underwater strike drone, publicly shown in 2023 and redesigned by 2025, intended to attack ships below the waterline while exposing only a slim sensor mast.
Ukraine's new TrophyLab portal hands vetted allies the blueprints, teardowns, and physical samples of captured Russian weapons. The real export is the time an ally saves building what defeats it.
Ukraine's first domestic guided glide bomb, the Vyrivniuvach, debuted at Eurosatory-2026 in Paris, a homemade answer to the JDAM-ER kits Kyiv has to import.
Ukraine's Defense Ministry says over 100 firms now train AI models on real combat imagery in the Palantir-built Brave1 Dataroom, with Shahed-type attack drones the priority target set.
Zelensky made June 11 the official day of the Unmanned Systems Forces as its mid-range campaign works through Russian logistics, but test pilots say many new drones arrive broken.
Ukraine's defense ministry says a Brave1-backed interceptor automates 95% of a Shahed intercept, leaving the operator to pick the target and clear the shot.
Ukraine's military has fielded an AI-controlled turret in more than ten units to shoot down the fiber-optic drones that electronic warfare cannot jam, the Defense Ministry says.
Ukraine's Defense Ministry has cleared the combat-tested Vepr robot for Armed Forces service, part of a plan to contract more than 25,000 ground robots in 2026 and pull soldiers off frontline resupply and evacuation runs.