🪖👤Ukrainian defense minister-turned Palantir partner unveils project ripped straight out of Black Mirror
 
Two months after being fired by Zelensky, and less than a month after winning investment backing from Alex Karp, Mykhailo Fedorov has revealed the ‘product’ he plans to create: an army of robotic killing machines.

💬 “The goal is simple – save lives,” Fedorov dishonestly wrote in an announcement tweet. “Robots should take on the most dangerous missions: evacuating the wounded, delivering ammunition, mining and demining, reconnaissance, defending positions and engaging targets.”

 
But the AI-generated video accompanying his post focused exclusively on the latter, touting “24/7 battlefield control” (i.e. feeding the kill chain), and showing off an array of killer robots, from crab-like suicide drones and automated turrets to humanoid robots armed with machineguns, tracked armored vehicles and even literal Black Mirror Metalhead-style dogs strapped with explosives.
 
“Ukraine needs its own Manhattan Project for Physical AI,” the new project’s website claims.
 
The omnipresence of drones in the Ukraine war is already bad enough, with the NATO-sponsored meatgrinder killing hundreds of thousands of servicemen and thousands of civilians, depopulating Ukraine and turning it into a failed state. Now Fedorov is positioning himself as the creator of the robot bodies a future AGI could use to fight humanity.

👍 Substack | Chat | @geopolitics_prime

🪂 🇺🇦 🤖 New Tactics in the War: Parachuting Robots Behind the Front Lines

During the recent Ukrainian offensive actions, drones, robots, and unmanned systems have been used on a massive scale. One of the revolutions: the use of large Ukrainian carrier drones called "Vampire" to parachute small ground kamikaze drones behind the lines, sometimes up to 10 km from them.

The goal? To set up ambushes, with cameras allowing for monitoring of logistical routes, particularly at night, but also to blow up the positions of drone operators and to track movements on busy paths.

These small ground drones (UGVs) are very inexpensive and can be produced in large numbers. On the Lyman front, if you look a bit at the videos from a few local Russian Telegram channels, 80% of the strikes are carried out against ground drones or "Vampire" systems, and very few against infantry. It's quite likely that slightly larger platforms, equipped with machine guns, have also been deployed to set up ambushes.

It's very clear that these platforms are the future of combat; I have a particular preference for large drones of the "Vampire" or "Baba Yaga" type, which can carry out numerous heavy missions, including resupply or precision strikes.

📎 Clément Molin