Mykhailo Fedorov, one of Ukraine's top government officials, has put self-operating weapons at the center of his country's survival plan against Russia. These are weapons that can find and attack targets with little or no help from a person. "Autonomous weapons are the new nuclear weapons," Fedorov stated, according to a New York Times profile published in May 2026 (NYT). The comment sums up an approach that has grown from an idea into real government policy over the past three years.

Fedorov's career tells the story of how fast this program has moved. As minister of digital transformation, he told the New York Times in July 2024 that "we need maximum automation" in war technology efforts (NYT). By December 2025, he had been promoted to first deputy prime minister, where he kept pushing AI-driven military systems as the key to winning the war (NYT). In that later profile, Fedorov described AI-powered drones as the center of a new arms race — a competition between nations to build the best weapons fastest. Ukraine, he said, is both a fighter in this war and a testing ground for the technology.

The program has grown step by step. Ukraine's "Army of Drones" effort, which bought and deployed commercial drones for combat, was followed by Fedorov's push for an "Army of Robots" — ground-based robotic vehicles that operate without anyone inside them (The Defense Post). Fedorov has said the Ministry of Defense's job is to scale up new technologies fast and get them to the front lines quickly (United24 media), treating speed as just as important as how powerful the weapons are.

Real hardware has followed. Fedorov announced that Ukraine's first guided aerial bomb is ready for combat use (United24 media). This is a shift from using store-bought drones modified for war to building weapons designed from scratch for fighting. It fits a larger pattern: Ukraine is moving from making do under wartime pressure to building a real domestic industry and working with other countries to keep a technological edge.

Working with other countries has become a major part of the strategy. In March 2026, the Ukrainian government approved a project that lets partner countries help train AI models for unmanned systems (Government portal). Think of it like a smartphone getting smarter from usage data: Ukraine shares what its systems learn in combat, and allied countries use that information to improve the software. Also in March 2026, President Zelenskyy met with the leadership of the Spanish group Sener to discuss jointly developing and manufacturing autonomous systems, communications systems, and laser-guided strike systems (President's Office). Earlier, in July 2025, Ukraine signed an agreement with Swift Beat to expand the company's drone production, with modern drones to be supplied to Ukraine first (President's Office).

Fedorov sees this kind of technology not as an add-on but as something that will decide whether Ukraine survives (NYT). The reasoning is straightforward: Russia has more soldiers and more factories. In a long war of attrition, where each side tries to wear the other down, time favors Moscow. Autonomous systems, in this view, act as a force multiplier — a way for Ukraine to hit harder than its numbers alone would allow, as long as Ukraine can develop and field them faster than Russia can.

The broader context here is that Ukraine is running a real-world experiment in AI warfare at a scale and intensity no NATO country has ever faced. The data, the failures, and the fixes are all being fed back into both Ukrainian production and the development programs of allied nations. The March 2026 AI training project makes this clear: partner countries get access to real combat data, and Ukraine gets access to allied computing power and engineering talent. Whether this arrangement creates a lasting advantage depends on unanswered questions, including how well enemy electronic warfare can jam or disable these systems, how reliably AI can pick targets when GPS signals are blocked, and how quickly Russia's own drone and AI programs can improve.

Fedorov's comparison to nuclear weapons is meant to grab attention. It puts a still-developing technology, one whose battlefield effectiveness is still debated and which still involves some human oversight, on the same level as the weapons that defined global power since 1945. The comparison sends a message of urgency to allies and to the Ukrainian public. But it also raises a question Fedorov has not publicly addressed. If these weapons really are as important as nuclear ones, then they need the same kind of rules, oversight structures, and careful thinking about escalation that nuclear weapons have received. A wartime program built to move fast is not designed to provide that kind of scrutiny.

The path from "Army of Drones" to guided bombs to AI partnerships with foreign governments shows a country that has made autonomous weapons part of its highest-level survival strategy. Fedorov's job has been to keep things moving, shrinking the gap between an idea, a factory, and the front line. The deals with Sener and Swift Beat, the AI training initiative, and the guided bomb announcement all point in the same direction: Ukraine is building a whole industry around autonomous warfare, not just buying systems off the shelf.