In September 2022, a Ukrainian grain merchant of Hungarian origin named Robert Brovdi (alias Magyar) decided to monitor the movements of Russian troops invading Ukraine using a Mavic drone with which he had recorded videos of his wedding. The image quality and autonomy were so good that he decided to buy dozens of similar devices with his own money to train the members of his unit.
Starting from that loyal group composed of a dozen drone pilots, today Robert Brovdi leads the so-called Unmanned Systems Force, composed of thousands of soldiers launching the most technologically advanced military advances of the century. This unit is responsible for deep bombings of Russian refineries, bridges, and bases, sometimes thousands of kilometers from the front, including the city of Moscow. The so-called Magyar's Birds (the name of his unit) revolutionize warfare every day with the evolution of their systems, the audacity of their plans, and the supremacy of their tactics over the enemy. It's as if they have advanced 10 years ahead of the strategies that very soon all their lazy European allies will have to adopt.
Ukraine has turned the war against the Kremlin not because it has more drones, but because they are better, they use them better, and some of them are trained with artificial intelligence. The robotization of the battlefield requires thousands of unmanned ground, aerial, and naval vehicles to avoid risking more human lives but at the same time be lethal to the enemy. The machine versus human process is already irreversible.
Technological superiority without response
A few weeks ago, military trucks painted with white lines like zebras began to appear on Russian Telegram channels. The goal was to confuse the Hornet drones, of American origin and trained with AI, that were pounding Russian logistics about 125 kilometers from the front.
The operators of this drone themselves, not the company that builds it, realized that they could add a Starlink internet terminal to its wings so that it could operate with a visual reference library full of trucks, armored vehicles, artillery, and radar stations. The company Perennial Autonomy was surprised by the innovation incorporated by the soldiers themselves. As these drones fly on more missions, they accumulate operational experience and the system learns from its mistakes: each campaign turns the drone into a much deadlier device.
How does Ukraine train its unmanned aircraft? Over half a million hours of drone footage recorded during the Russian invasion are already part of a new set of artificial intelligence data: it is one of the largest collections of real combat images ever assembled. "Ukraine has produced more real drone images than any other conflict in history. Those data are only valuable if someone does the work to make them usable," says Peter Kant, founder of Enabled Intelligence.
All these elements already act in coordination within a technological ecosystem never imagined even by the futuristic writer Philip K. Dick and his Blade Runners. The Ukrainian company Swarmer has already carried out more than 100 operations in which a reconnaissance drone plots the route and two unmanned bombing devices autonomously coordinate in an attack sequence. It is the transition from individual AI to collective intelligence of machines that communicate with each other without human intervention.
Ukraine has some of the most disruptive applications of the company Palantir, a leader in artificial intelligence developments applied to the battlefield. Its Prismasoftware processes thousands of drone, satellite, Intelligence signals, and field positions in real-time to optimize Ukrainian attack routes within Russian airspace. It is literally thebrainthat coordinates the deep drone campaign. And it is also the clearest example of what Palantir does best: it does not build the weapons, it builds the nervous system that connects them.
Palantir is the technology company that built the Intelligence system that modern States use to see, understand, and act on the world in real-time. Russia, a police state based on controlling its population, does not possess anything similar. If drones are the fists of this war, the company Palantir is the eyes and the brain.
Another advance for Ukraine has been having real-time commercial satellite images, something it did not have at the beginning of the invasion, which has made Kiev a much less dependent state on US Intelligence. In the last six months, the Colorado-based company Vantor has improved the speed and accuracy of Ukrainian drone attacks. According to technology providers and individuals involved in the missions, the rapid delivery of geospatial intelligence to frontline soldiers has reduced the time by up to 90% needed to locate and attack Russian targets. The software complements the images, allowing users to identify and investigate targets in detail.
In all wars prior to the 21st century, satellite intelligence was a monopoly of the most powerful states. In the Gulf War of 1991, the US had satellite images of Iraq that their own allies could not see. In the Balkan wars, NATO had reconnaissance capabilities that individual European armies did not possess. The rule was simple: without their satellites, no strategic vision of the battlefield.
For the first time in the history of war, an invaded country has been able to compensate for its military inferiority with massive access to real-time commercial satellite images. Three companies have been decisive: Maxar Technologies, the US commercial satellite company, provided images of Russian troop concentrations on the border weeks before the February 2022 invasion, allowing Ukraine and its Western allies to alert the world about Russian preparations. They even showed the world the crimes of Bucha to refute Russian lies about who was the real perpetrator of the civilian killings.
Planet Labs operates the world's largest constellation of Earth observation satellites, with over 200 satellites photographing the entire Earth's surface every day. This means that any troop movement, any vehicle concentration, any change in artillery position is recorded with a frequency that was previously impossible without huge state resources. And Ukraine has this service. Satellogic, an Argentine company with Chinese and American capital, has provided high-resolution images that allow the identification of specific types of military vehicles in real-time.
Russia began the invasion of Ukraine, according to Kremlin excuses, to "denazify" and "demilitarize" the Kiev government. The Nazism part was pure internal propaganda, but demilitarization was an objective to regain control of the Ukrainian state and turn it into a vassal of Moscow.
Today, Ukraine is one of the countries with a military industry that surpasses all its European neighbors and only finds a competitor in the US and Israel, but with more competitive prices and combat experience not against armed militias but against a nuclear power.