Ukraine's new Defense AI Center is putting AI inside the kill chain, steering drones onto target in the final seconds

Ukraine's Defense AI Center A1 is embedding AI across the kill chain, including last-second drone guidance that survives Russian jamming, while a separate reform hands AI the call on which drones to buy.

Set up at the Ministry of Defense in March and headed by Danylo Tsvok, A1 already runs AI inside the kill chain, the sequence from spotting a target to striking it and checking the result, Euromaidan Press wrote. Tsvok said AI can automate parts of that chain, while stressing that Ukraine is not building fully autonomous weapons and a human keeps the final call.

At the front, the load-bearing piece is last-mile guidance. Computer vision steers a drone onto its target in the final seconds, the center said, and the same models hold the lock under the electronic warfare that cuts the operator's link, the very link Russian jamming kills over the last stretch. So the drone finishes the run on its own optics. Tsvok said the same vision runs in interceptor drones that down incoming Shaheds and in gun turrets an operator only confirms.

A separate reform takes AI up a layer, into who gets paid. Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has said the ministry will lean on AI to process battlefield data and determine which drones it should procure, the Atlantic Council noted, to maximize effectiveness and cut the corruption risk in human-run buying. According to the Defense Post, units request a capability rather than a named model, and data from DOT-Chain, Brave1 Market, the eBalov effectiveness platform and the DELTA battle-management system ranks what performs. Kyiv took 485,000 drones through that pipeline in five months, 95 percent domestic, worth $697 million.

Tsvok told Reuters he expects a "war of operating systems" with Russia inside three to five years, and that 80 percent of drone spending now goes to systems already proven in combat. US and European officials are reading Ukraine's setup, per the Atlantic Council, as a starting point for their own AI defense plans, though the part where battlefield data picks the buy is the one that will not export cleanly.