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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Stuart Willey and Alex Dibble. The global security focus is shifting as the week goes on to Ukraine. Western defence ministers have been meeting in Brussels with Pete Hegseth, the new US Defence Secretary, telling them that the US will no longer be the guarantor of security in Europe.
There is a lot to analyse there, and we will be doing that tomorrow, when we will also look ahead to the Munich Security Conference, which starts on Friday. Today we're still talking about Ukraine, because The Times' Maxim Tucker has been to Kharkiv to see robots. Robots Ukraine has built and sent into combat to fight against Russian soldiers. Could this be the future of not just this war, but war in general?
Maxim is back in Kiev now and is speaking to us from there today. Maxim, it's a striking idea, isn't it? A platoon of robots rolling onto the battlefield. What exactly have you been to see?
So there's a brigade called the Harte Brigade, which has been pioneering some of Ukraine's modern warfare approaches, including adopting NATO standards for the entire brigade. And they have been experimenting with land robots, which are remote controlled, have equipped with heavy machine guns. Some are equipped with anti-tank mines and other kinds of explosives. And they have used these in the first kind of platoon size assault on a Russian position.
And how it worked was these robots were advancing. They would lay down covering fire one for another, almost as infantry. So in the place of infantry, more than five, we can't say the full number, but more than five of them attacking this Russian position, using the machine guns to suppress the enemy, keep their heads down, and then deliver these anti-tank mines right into the middle of the entrance of the fortified position.
And they then detonated these mines and kind of blew up a very large portion of this trench line. Maxim, lethal robots can be a bit of a sci-fi trope, whether it's Robocop or the Daleks on Doctor Who. These aren't humanoid, though, are they, the ones we're talking about? What are they like? Right, so they're on wheels or tracks. So like Daleks, they wouldn't be able to go upstairs. There's just been downside. So they're controlled in the same way as kind of
aerial drones they have a joystick some you can drive with kind of fpv goggles so you're in the first person view as if you're inside the drone directing it that way some are given directed simply by camera or others are directed with drones in the air and they try and use actually all of these different systems to coordinate their attacks while they're carrying them out and the idea is that the operators can sit several kilometers further back so they're
away from the danger. They're not exposed to direct fire in the same way. And they can be sitting in fortified positions where they're safer. And this is really important for the Ukrainians because they're really struggling with manpower problems, whereas the Russians are quite happy to send people to slaughter to gain a few hundred meters of territory. Ukrainians don't have that luxury. So they're really looking for different ways to try and save their manpower and stop taking so many casualties.
So often we talk about how Ukraine's war has become dominated by drones. Will these robots be as transformative as drones, the type we see in Ukraine's skies and seas?
So every year in the Ukraine war, the soldiers will tell you that every year is different. You know, soldiers who fought in 2022 is a completely different battlefield to those who fought in 2025. So for example, with these FPV drones in the air, the kind of the grey area between Russian and Ukrainian armies is growing larger because these first person view suicide drones have a larger range, and it's more dangerous to be out in the open. And there's just so many of them, it's very, very difficult to try and advance in that kind of conditions.
Now, these robots, these land robots are a kind of solution to that, because obviously both sides still want to take territory to take ground and to hold ground you ultimately you need people on the ground, infantry in positions to try and hold territory, otherwise you don't control it.
And the solution that Ukrainians are looking for is to try and make sure these robots can either stay in positions and hold ground, and in which case you just need somebody to come and reload them and change the batteries every now and again. So you still will need human personnel going close to them sometimes, or they can be used in an assault that lasts several hours before their batteries need to be charged again.
Now, there are still some drawbacks with this technology. Sometimes the robots were getting stuck. There is a lot of jamming and interference in radio-controlled robots. But those problems are already being considered by robotics developers, and they're looking at different ways, like using satellite receivers to transmit internet to the drones. They have drones higher in the air, so they can relay signals further distances away.
and having more advanced tracks so that there are kind of sophisticated suspension on the tracks that allow the robots to shoot very accurately on the move. Maxim, so often conflicts drive big leaps in military innovation, and you have been to meet these robotics developers. What are the prospects that Ukraine could become a weapons exporter now?
So Ukraine already sees itself in that role. It's had to develop very innovative weapons and it's had to do it at very cheap. So it's these kind of sophisticated weapons that they're using are much, much cheaper than the kind of Western equivalent where,
small problems are kind of ironed out at expense and then more and more technology is added to the thing and then eventually it becomes a very expensive piece of kit. Ukraine is doing the opposite. It's trying to produce these at scale. It means it's using a lot of pieces from China as a result, but as a kind of assembler of and
advanced technologies is already kind of quite far ahead of the field. And it has this ambition. Alexander Commission, who's the former Minister of Strategic Industries, and now a close advisor to President Zelensky, told me that that is his ambition for Ukraine, that Ukraine has more capacity to produce weapons than funding. The state budget cannot allow it to make the use of all this capacity. So it sees itself as offering Ukraine
to Western partners who need to rearm, who need to kind of make sure that their technology is advanced enough to deal with the kind of Russian threat that is posed to the world today. And they are offering their services to help develop innovative technologies and deliver them into Western armories. These land robots incorporate elements of AI, AI
And the need for guardrails around lethal weapons technology has been debated at the AI summit in Paris this week. Is that something the Ukrainians are grappling with?
They have AI-assisted targeting, so they can spot a kind of movement or target and help determine the shape, and they will kind of identify that on the sensors of the robot or the drone. But it's then left to the Ukrainian to pull the trigger. In some cases, in the use of aerial drones, it seems that Ukraine has employed AI to help guide drones to their target areas.
even when there is jamming. So, you know, in the last kilometer, if they start to get jammed, they still go towards their target and the AI helps them do that. And that starts to remove, as you say, those guardrails. The difficulty is it's great to have guardrails and kind of protections and prohibitions on the use of AI if that's something that everyone or kind of the entire world abides by. If you have a situation where someone like Russia is anyway not going to use, abide by any guardrails,
then you are going to have an unlevel playing field when you try to go to war with a country like that. So ultimately, this war is probably pushing the boundaries of what human society considers acceptable and unlevel.
different Western societies will have to make difficult decisions about what they do to account to a Russian threat that is essentially immoral on this factor. Maxim, we've had strong words from the US Defence Secretary at NATO today. Pete Hegseth has been warning that Europe needs to spend more on defending Ukraine and also that the US wants a sovereign Ukraine.
It perhaps goes against Donald Trump's comments this week that Ukraine may be Russian someday or they may not be Russian someday. How are Trump's comments going down in Kyiv?
Obviously, that comment is very alarming for Ukrainians that Trump can even conceive that there's a possibility that Ukraine would be considered Russian one day. And that has been met with concern inside this country. But as ever, you never know with Trump what's a kind of throwaway comment or an accidental comment. I think that Ukrainians feel like it's very, very difficult to engage meaningfully in peace talks with Putin when he's already had several kind of
ceasefire agreements and violated them and just used those opportunities to seek some kind of advantage. They don't trust
And that's why they very much still want to see meaningful security guarantees from the United States. And Zelensky has been saying again repeatedly that unless there are security guarantees from the U.S., European security guarantees are not enough. We want to see U.S. guarantees in order to try and stop this war. I mean, ultimately, all the discussion here has really been on the security.
the Ukrainian side and the U.S. putting pressure on the Ukrainians. And obviously there has been some discussions. We don't know anything about them between the Russians and the U.S. This has all been kept very secretive, which is curious and also concerning for the Ukrainians. But there's been no public indication, certainly. And every time Putin gives an interview to his audience in Russia, which is ultimately the most important audience to gauge what he's thinking,
He continues to say that Ukraine has no right to sovereignty, that Ukraine shouldn't exist as a state. And it's very hard to see where that perspective could allow for any meaningful peace arrangement with Ukraine. Maxim, thank you. That is The Times' correspondent Maxim Tucker speaking to us from Kiev. As we mentioned, tomorrow we'll dig more into Pete Hegseth's comments.
And look ahead to the Munich Security Conference, where the US Vice President J.D. Vance is set to meet with Ukraine's President Zelensky. But for today, that's it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of the time.
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