‘Like the movies’: How Ukraine’s ground robots are changing rules of war

Ternopil, Ukraine – A ground robot carrying ammunition and resembling a real-life cousin of Wall-E, the 2008 Pixar cartoon’s rusty protagonist, got stuck late one night in a trench in northeastern Ukraine.

Named Murakha (ant in Ukrainian), the robot was a bit more than a metre high, but had a large clearance to trudge across rugged terrain, bombed-out streets, mud, sleet or snow on tank-like tracks at up to 12km (7.5 miles) per hour.

Its pilots were hidden in a bunker tens of kilometres away from the stuck robot, slouched in chairs or pacing nervously next to a screen showing grainy, barely visible footage from Murakha’s camera.

Sending a human rescue team to the front-line area was deemed too dangerous, an officer in charge of planning robotic missions said. Instead, the pilots managed to get another Murakha to pull the first one out with a rope.

“It was like they show in movies – we conquered a planet, everyone was happy and smiling,” the officer, who only identified himself by his call sign, Maska (The Mask), told Al Jazeera. He withheld his name and details of service in accordance with wartime protocol.

“You get an ecstatic pleasure understanding your job was not in vain,” he said, describing other missions near the besieged eastern city of Pokrovsk that required hours of planning and lasted mere minutes because of fire from omnipresent Russian drones.

Murakha and its siblings are manufactured by Robotic Complexes, a company in the western city of Ternopil, as well as by more than 200 startups all over Ukraine.

They’re part of a wider technological revolution that eliminates the traditional notion of warfare as man-to-man combat and replaces humans on the front line amid Ukraine’s dire desertion and conscription crisis.