‘Robots don’t bleed’: Ukraine sends machines into the battlefield in place of human soldiers | CNN

The scene is as old as warfare itself. Two soldiers, hands in the air, surrendering and carefully following the orders barked at them by the other side. Except in this case, there were no human captors in sight. Instead, the two Russians were submitting to Ukrainian land robots and drones controlled by a pilot from the safety of a position miles away from the front line. This is the future of warfare – and it’s happening now. “The position was taken without a single shot being fired,” Mykola “Makar” Zinkevych, the commander of the Ukrainian unit that conducted the mission, told CNN. Zinkevych, who serves in the “NC13” unit of Ukraine’s Third Separate Assault Brigade, handling ground-based, robotic strike systems, said the operation last summer was the first time in history that an enemy position was stormed and prisoners taken by ground robots and drones without the involvement of infantry. It’s a claim that’s hard to corroborate, but it underscores Kyiv’s pride in its technology. Since then, missions in which robots replace human soldiers have become the unit’s daily bread and butter. The skies above the front lines in Ukraine have been swarming with dron