00:02Autonomous weapons have come to dominate the war with Russia and Ukraine.
00:07Aerial drones are used on the front lines for reconnaissance and to drop explosives,
00:12while down below ground robots support logistics operations.
00:16Ukraine has built a sprawling drone industry from scratch,
00:20hailed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the best in the world.
00:24But the dismissal last month of Popular Defense Minister Mikhailov Fedorov,
00:28one of the most ardent backers of drones,
00:31raised some concerns over the future of the sector.
00:34Despite his removal, industry players and military personnel say there was no going back now.
00:41After 2022, especially, there was such an explosion.
00:46The initiatives went down,
00:47when the talented Ukrainian people,
00:52the Ukrainian entrepreneurs,
00:55who were involved in the search of financial sources,
01:01to support a certain group of young engineers,
01:07let's say,
01:08who had the initiative themselves in the development of WPLA,
01:13in the development of those or other models,
01:17robots,
01:17NRK,
01:18program management,
01:20and so on.
01:21Through this bottom-up initiative,
01:23programmers,
01:23telecom specialists,
01:25and engineers are fully integrated into the army.
01:28Young engineers began to create new products,
01:30showed them to the military who took what they wanted,
01:33and then started their own development.
01:36Fedorov had been crucial to pushing the technological shift within Ukraine's army.
01:40The innovation continues through young engineers under the mantra of using drones to save lives.
01:46the
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