Cloud to battlefield presentation script

Abstract

Let me begin with an episode announced by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Ukraine’s Arms Makers’ Day. On 13 April 2026, he described an enemy position as having been captured solely by unmanned platforms and reported more than 22,000 ground-robot missions in three months, with no infantry and no Ukrainian casualties. Later reporting qualified that account: human operators still controlled the platforms, and some analysts interpreted the announcement as strategic communication rather than a literal description of a fully autonomous operation. The episode captures a central difficulty in studying this field. The battlefield is changing, but what has actually been delegated to machines is contested, performed in public, and difficult to verify from outside.