Ukraine's General Staff added a new line to its tally of estimated Russian losses on 3 May 2026: ground robotic complexes. The category, published for the first time, showed 1,306 Russian ground robots destroyed since the start of the full-scale invasion, with 12 added in the past 24 hours. The disclosure comes as both Russia and Ukraine race to push both tracked and wheeled remotely-controlled logistics robots into a front-line kill zone where any vehicle can no longer move safely.
A new column in the daily losses report
The General Staff's 3 May report registered a now standard 1000+ figure — 1,080 — Russian troop losses in the past 24 hours, bringing the running total of estimated Russian personnel losses since 2022 to roughly 1,334,030. Other notable equipment losses included 2,224 more operational-tactical drones (total 269,813), 76 artillery systems (total 41,193), three armored combat vehicles (total 24,503), and two tanks (total 11,908).
The new line — "ground robotic complex" — showed 1,306 total destroyed Russian units, with 12 added in the past day. The General Staff did not break down the figure by logistics and combat robots.
Drone-based last-mile logistics
In November 2025, Ivan Kyrychevskyi, a serviceman with Ukraine's 413th "Raid" Regiment and a Defense Express weapons expert, said Ukrainian drone crews had "significantly increased" the number of strikes on Russian ground robots, which Russia is using to take logistics off vulnerable wheeled vehicles. Kyrychevsky noted that the small size of the robots makes them hard to hunt — in a briefing accompanied by footage of a Ukrainian strike on a Russian Kurier robot.
Lieutenant Viktor Pavlov of Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps told The Guardian in April that land robots now account for 90% of Ukrainian army logistics. "It's very difficult to move around because of enemy first-person-view drones. So we use robotic systems," Pavlov said. Ukrainian forces ran 7,000 ground-vehicle missions in January 2026 alone — a record, per The Guardian's reporting on Pavlov's unit.
In 2025, Ukrainian domestic manufacturers of ground robots raised $17.5 mn in investment.
