Mykhailo Fedorov, the man who built Ukraine’s Army of Drones and was fired as its defense minister ten weeks ago, launched an “Army of Robots” on Saturday, September 26, 2026. He announced it on X and in a presentation at the IT Arena conference in Lviv, with a one-minute video and a website that opens with the line “We are here to replace people with robots on the battlefield and save lives.”
The first target is specific: a humanoid robot kills a Russian soldier within six months of launch. The second is an assault on a Russian position within 12 months with no infantry involved, robots and drones talking to each other over shared protocols. The site is recruiting robotics companies, engineers and a chief technology officer, plus funds, angels and corporations willing to co-invest.
Fedorov says the Army of Robots is not a single company. On September 1 he announced a defense-tech company of his own, with Palantir CEO Alex Karp as first lead investor. Saturday’s announcement named no company at all.
The Robots In The Video Do Not Exist Yet
Every machine in the launch video is an AI-generated render, the Kyiv Independent reported. The humanoid numbered 0427, the crab-legged walkers, the tracked snake and the six-wheeled gun cart are concept art, not product shots, and Fedorov’s own post makes no hardware claim beyond the goals.
The pitch rests on the record instead. In his X post, Fedorov says drones now account for over 95% of battlefield strikes and that Ukraine has more than 700 UAV manufacturers, both figures from him and neither independently published. The robotization case does not need those numbers to stand up. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense reported more than 9,000 armed ground-robot missions in a single month this spring, up from 2,900 in November 2025, and the K2 Brigade has been running the first dedicated UGV battalion, as DroneXL reported in March. Wheeled and tracked robots already fight. What Ukraine does not have is a walking one that shoots.
Fedorov’s stated job for humanoids is narrower than the video suggests. Per dev.ua’s account of the Lviv presentation, the first tasks are mechanical: reloading machine guns, swapping batteries, placing sensors. “Robots should take on the most dangerous missions,” he wrote, listing casualty evacuation, ammunition runs, mining and demining, reconnaissance and holding positions.
Fedorov Is Building Outside The Government That Fired Him
President Volodymyr Zelensky removed Fedorov on July 15, 2026, after six months as defense minister. Street protests followed. Six days later Zelensky dismissed Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, the man Fedorov had been fighting, a sequence DroneXL covered in Fedorov Ousted: Ukraine Removes The Architect Of Its Drone War After Six Months.
Since then Fedorov has courted U.S. money. He spent late August in the United States meeting donors and tech executives, and on September 1 said Karp would be the first major investor in his new company. CNBC reported the investment is Karp’s personally, not Palantir’s, with no size disclosed and no product named. The Financial Times reported he is also seeking U.S. backing for a separate fund covering battlefield robotics, interceptors and AI-enabled missiles.
Which of those vehicles owns the Army of Robots is the gap in Saturday’s announcement. Ukrainska Pravda reported the project will be run by a “large private technology company” whose name comes later. Fedorov’s post says only that the team will invest in defense-tech companies, launch its own projects, test with the military and scale what works. The Army of Drones, launched in 2022, was a government program with United24 fundraising behind it. This one has a recruiting form and a promise.
DroneXL’s Take
I’d bet on Fedorov before I’d bet on the video. The renders are a recruiting poster, and I doubt anyone at IT Arena mistook the crab-walkers for a roadmap. The record underneath is what makes this worth taking seriously: the Army of Drones started in 2022 as a fundraising slogan and produced the 9,000-missions-a-month ground-robot war I saw the makers of in the Brave1 pavilion in Düsseldorf this March. Fedorov has done the not-a-single-company trick once, from inside the government, with a budget.
Doing it from outside is a different problem. His procurement reforms made enemies in the ministry and the contractor base, and those people still run the ministry. A private venture that tests with the military needs the military to say yes, and the six-month humanoid target is the number to hold him to: it lands in late March 2027. If a walking robot has killed a Russian by then, Fedorov will have rebuilt his machine without a government. If it hasn’t, the first thing to check is whether anyone let him near a trench.
Sources: Mykhailo Fedorov on X, thearmyofrobots.com, Kyiv Independent, Ukrainska Pravda, dev.ua, CNBC
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
