As someone who lives in the world’s capital of stochastic gun violence/terrorism, seeing this headline pop up several times from happening gives me some hope.

Trying to de-escalate when everybody has guns is incredibly hard and can go catastrophically wrong at any moment even if the intentions of everybody involved are genuine (i.e. the russians genuinely intend to surrender).

If during the process of surrender the russians spooked and ended up shooting at the drones, this wouldn’t be the end of the Ukrainian soldiers lives who chose to step back from easy decisive violence and open up the possibility of allowing the russians to surrender. The Ukrainians had to make a choice to engage in this kind of military culture where this kind of behavior is normalized, you flank the enemy hard enough if you have the luxury too that they are forced to surrender to your robots.

That is something genuinely powerful. It makes the possibility of de-escalation more resilient and less prone to chaos (or chaos agents) shattering it apart. If de-escalation goes sideways with a robot, that doesn’t place a political pressure on the force involved that could have chosen overwhelming violence from the beginning to have chosen violence first. It just means some robots got blown up.

Ukraine innovating with this capacity creates a real geopolitical impact in terms of setting a standard that innovation in robotics should make us critically examine a rationalization of violence against our enemies based upon our own mortal fear of what happens if we don’t act with impulsive immediacy. In war AND in civil/law enforcement contexts.

When somebody with a gun escalates a situation because they think they are going to die, rationality and accountability can go out the window quick, not only is this obviously brutal but it also allows a mirror ideology of extermination to arise against perpetrators of violence that doesn’t really solve the issue at hand.

This isn’t to say killing russian soldiers won’t stop the russian military, but rather war and violence tend to want to spread like wildfire and the more videos of russians surrendering to Ukrainian drones and not being murdered for it there are, the harder russian propaganda has to desperately work to villainize Ukraine and motivate their soldiers to kill. Unmotivated soldiers are infamously bad at committing to charging the enemy trenches for doomed offensives.

What Ukraine is doing with instances like these is saying -hold on if someone tries to escalate a situation and put one of us into a snap situation where we have to decide to shoot or risk being shot, not shooting and listening… we need to use a robot to remove our enemies chokehold over demanding we make that choice in a blistering instant not become more comfortable with shooting in a blink of an eye the moment things feel off???

Contrast this with how the US innovated with drones during the Iraq and Afghanistan War years and how presidents such as Bush, Obama, Trump and then Biden trampled mud across complex geopolitical questions about the ethics of lethal drone usage especially with regards to sovereignty and accountability, which in many ways sowed the seeds for the unravelling of what was left of the functioning international rules based order.

I know this sounds tangential, but consider how in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars the US military did not even consider it worth armoring the humvees and trucks it sent soldiers to patrol in until there was a massive public backlash from the wildly unnecessary and irresponsible danger it put US soldiers into for no good reason when better options existed.

You can see in the desperate rush to make MRAPS that the US culturally was too dysfunctional at that point to see this positive potential in drones, it took a country like Ukraine to establish the precedent even though the most obvious use of drones in a COIN “hearts and minds” operation were using the drones to win over the “hearts and minds” by “defanging” standoff situations with drones that will not be spurned by their operators into lethal force from the fear and shock of ambush or calamity alone…

Oh well, we have Ukraine to be thankful for. Personally in an odd way I find Ukraine’s use of unmanned vehicles hopeful to some degree as the narrative has been so oppressive in my society that the advent of autonomous swarms of drones could only mean more consolidation of power, more lethal capability and even more destructive war. Ukraine has proven with this use of drones as well as the use of UGVs for evacuating wounded that this simplistic idea of unmanned vehicles as bringers of dehumanizing control and destruction is a mirage created by our obsession with the aesthetics of dystopia.