AI Drones Make Armistice in Ukraine 'Impossible'; Lee Jae-myung Says AI-Enhanced Arms Race Makes Inter-Korean Dialogue Impossible
AI drones have dramatically transformed the Ukraine War, igniting an arms race that has led to a "no armistice." The intensifying arms buildup has made inter-Korean dialogue seem impossible.
Analysts of AI drones and AI-powered lethal weapons have coined the slogan "Competition or Death" for these weapons, highlighting the challenges of establishing a foundation for peace negotiations in a system of arms buildup.
In his New Year's address, President Lee Jae-myung stated, "From the AI era to the energy transition, this time of disruption to the existing order presents limitless opportunities for innovators who will lead 'creative destruction.'" He added, "From the construction of nuclear-powered submarines to uranium enrichment and expanded authority for spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, our renaissance-era ROK-US alliance will serve as a strong supporter of economic revitalization."
The president continued, “The government is consistently pursuing measures to ease military tensions and restore trust between the South and the North, and is forming a consensus with the international community, including the United States and China, on peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.” Just before taking office, he formalized the plan to “replace human troops with AI and replace weapons with drones.”
A New York Times reporter, who covered the 18 months during which Ukraine’s intensively developed AI-powered drones rapidly developed into terrifying lethal weapons, revealed the connections between billionaires and the United States in the development and deployment of Ukraine’s AI-powered drones into battlefields, stating, “They can be trained to hunt almost anything: buses, parked aircraft, podiums from which speakers address audiences, step-down transformers that distribute power to the grid.”
A reporter covering the Ukrainian frontline reported, "Leepa (the pilot) pressed a switch with his right hand, releasing the drone from human control. The AI-powered Bumblebee landed without further external instructions, and the signal connection between Leepa and Bobber (the AI drone) was lost." "But this didn't matter. They continued their attack without their guidance. The sensors and software focused on the building (where the Russian soldiers were hiding) and independently adjusted their direction and speed," Gulab said on the 31st.
With more training and computing power, AI drones could be fine-tuned to identify and prioritize military targets based on cost or threat level, or to strike vulnerable areas such as exhaust vents or where the turret meets the hull.
While AI drones should have the authority for human operators to abort individual attacks and a kill switch to shut down the entire system, these robust safeguards are lacking. By the time the AI drones, free from human supervision, reach the end of their flights, some semi-autonomous weapons in Ukraine can already identify targets without human intervention, and many human-controlled Ukrainian systems are cheap and can be replicated and modified by capable developers anywhere, the New York Times reported.
“Even weapons like GPS-guided missiles and laser-guided bombs, often touted for their incredible precision, often hit the wrong spot, killing innocents, and no golden age has passed, often without accountability,” the New York Times said. “Instead, semi-autonomous drones exacerbate existing dangers and pose new threats.”
Throughout the war between Russia and Ukraine in 2025, AI drone attacks, in barely visible and unannounced moments, have begun to shape the era of killer robots on the battlefield.
Across the Ukrainian frontline and over the airspace of both countries, drones equipped with newly developed autonomous capabilities are now being deployed in daily combat.
The New York Times reported, “According to a brochure from the AI drone manufacturer, Bumblebee missiles launched from Ukrainian positions had conducted more than 1,000 combat flights against Russian targets by last spring,” and “pilots say they have flown thousands more since.”
The New York Times continued, “The appearance of Ukraine’s Bumblebees immediately alarmed the Kremlin military, according to two Russian technical intelligence reports. One document, based on a damaged Bumblebee autopsy collected from the front, described the mystery drones, equipped with chipsets and motherboards, as ‘comparable to those of the world’s leading microelectronics manufacturers.’ The other report, while highlighting anticipated flaws in the prototype, concluded that ‘despite current limitations, the technology will prove effective’ and ‘will continue to expand its scope of use.’”
Ukrainian AI drone Bumblebee doesn’t fly alone. Under pressure from Russian aggression, Ukraine became a rapid feedback and live-fire testing ground, where arms manufacturers, governments, venture capitalists, frontline troops, and coders and engineers from across the West collaborated to produce weapons that automate parts of the traditional military kill chain.
Drones, equipped with proprietary software trained on massive datasets and equipped with autonomous capabilities often running on commodity microcomputers like Raspberry Pis, are now part of the bloody and destructive daily life of war.
A reporter who witnessed their development firsthand during 18 months of reporting in Ukraine, visiting weapons manufacturers, test sites, and frontline troops repeatedly, said, “Functions now performed autonomously include unmanned takeoff or hovering, positioning, attack area navigation, target recognition, tracking, and pursuit—all the way to the deadly end of the journey: a terminal strike.” “Software designers are networking multiple drones with shared apps, allowing human pilots to exchange flight control or orchestrate drones into tightly coordinated attacks—a step toward computer-managed swarms.”
He stated that such AI drones are highly capable weapons, not only for ground brigades but also for air defense, intelligence, and deep-strike units.
AI drones emerged with the advent of drones flying via fiber optic cables, which emerged as a solution on the battlefield. This led to last-mile autonomous targeting, a form of computer-based attack where computer vision and autonomous flight control guide the drone into the final attack phase without the pilot's radio input.
These AI drone systems offer the advantage of increasing the effectiveness of strikes at long ranges and beyond the radio horizon, when mountainous terrain or the Earth's curvature interfere with reliable radio signals.
Theoretically, the technical solution for AI drones was simple: if pilots anticipated a communications outage, they could hand off flight control to an automated standby device equipped with a powerful chipset and extensively trained software to complete the mission.
Combining this technology with onboard sensors and cameras, pilots could lock onto a target with a mini-aircraft and launch the drone for a solo attack.
The development of Underdog, the core of Ukraine's AI drone, was supported by government and venture capital funding. Technology company NORDA spent most of 2024 testing a prototype that evolved into Underdog, a small module attached to a combat drone.
When piloting an Underdog-equipped quadcopter, a pilot wearing FPV goggles controls the weapon from takeoff to destination.
However, during the final stages of the flight, the pilot has the option to authorize an autonomous attack, called a pixel lock, through a screen window that zooms in on a target of interest, such as a building or car. That's when Underdog takes control.
Underdog began testing stationary objects, but iterative updates allowed the software to track moving targets and extend its range.
The initial module allowed terminal attacks at a range of 400 meters, and by the summer of 2025, with NORDA software version 5, the pixel lock had reached 2,000 meters, or approximately 1.25 miles. By this time, the modules had been distributed to frontline FPV teams in the Ukrainian battlefield.
"We've received very good feedback," the official told the Times, speaking anonymously.
The company's bulletin boards listed initial hits, including Russian artillery, trucks, mobile radar units, and tanks, the Times reporter said.
As drone strikes focused on Russian energy facilities and key personnel, Russia responded by disabling GPS.
Can AI drones fly autonomously without GPS? The Times investigation began in late 2023, when Brian Stream, founder of a niche drone photography business, discussed equipping a Latvian company with a visual navigation system for long-range drones.
The Deep Strike drone, essentially a slow-flying cruise missile capable of flying hundreds of miles, required precise navigation to evade air defenses by zigzagging through foreign airspace for hours, frequently changing altitudes.
Russia responded by jamming GPS. Stream adopted a Hollywood-style approach for filming: processing visual information collected from multiple cameras, comparing it to onboard 3D terrain maps, and programming autopilot software to triangulate the weapon's location. This software, called the Visual Positioning System (VPS), was used.
It was installed on various airborne platforms, allowing them to navigate the terrain without satellite linkage. Since it didn't transmit or receive signals, it was impossible to jam or spoof.
In early 2024, Strem traveled by train from Warsaw to Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian officials via LinkedIn. He was escorted to the exhibition command center, where he and a Ukrainian official were preparing to install a Vermeer module on a deep-sea drone.
Soon, the power went out in the building, and the Ukrainian official told him, "Ukraine was short on money, personnel, and time."
"He had a huge map of Russia and Ukraine behind him, and he immediately started telling us what targets we were going to attack," Strem told the Times. Strem, a drone aerial photographer, served in the Ukrainian War.
For the next year, he met with drone manufacturers across the country, testing prototypes on various drones, and ultimately launched the VPS-212, a roughly one-pound box containing two cameras and a minicomputer. Assembled in an office next to a Brooklyn bagel shop, the module can maintain position at speeds up to 218 mph—not fast enough for a proper cruise missile, but fast enough for most deep-sea strike drones.
By the summer of 2025, engineers at Vermeer, a company behind Stream, had helped soldiers attach the VPS to drones flown by various units attacking strategic Russian targets.
For security reasons, Vermeer does not publicly discuss specific strikes, but Strem and a Vermeer employee in Ukraine told the New York Times that the VPS module guided the drones to verified hits.
This achievement made Vermeer the winner of a competition for contracts and funding, raising $12 million in a recent round that included venture capital firm Draper Associates.
The New York Times reported that "Vermeer Navigation rekindled interest in 2025 with the Pentagon, which proposed attaching Vermeer's VPS to its fleet of deep-sea strike drones. The U.S. Air Force has contracted the company to develop a similar system that would mount the VPS on drones to scan the sky and search for celestial bodies." The US Air Force's approach was similar to an AI sextant, capable of precision flight above clouds and water.
The Ukrainian military's aggressive shift to drone warfare helped save the country from defeat.
For nearly four years, Ukraine had mobilized the world's first military reorganized around unmanned weapons, blunting ground attacks from Russia's much larger army.
Even as Russia, mobilizing oil revenues and at least four times the Ukrainian population, restructured Ukraine's offensive, the drones played a crucial role in the response and formed a crucial foundation for peace negotiations.
But AI weapons have limitations. Nearly all short-range lethal drones, the primary means of halting Russian military advances, are individually piloted.
Each is a brutal aerial acrobat. Reaching speeds of up to 70 mph, the small multicopters can hover, circle, and fly in new directions for minutes, giving pilots the ability to locate, pursue, and kill human victims. The New York Times stated, “Such attacks, especially during sustained Russian attacks, can force drone teams to fight slowly. Speed is determined by the time between each drone’s launch and its final approach, which often exceeds 20 minutes at typical ranges.” The Times described them as “useful for short-term warfare.”
During large-scale Russian infiltrations on the front lines, single drone attack sequences can feel slow and inadequate, forcing enemies to flee between sorties.
Considering the ongoing challenge of swarming drone firepower, designers of autonomous combat drone technology have sought to assemble drones in distinct swarms over the attacked nation. Even small swarms allow pilots to focus multiple weapons in rapid succession, strengthening defenses and increasing the likelihood of a machine-only attack. The New York Times reported on drone pilot training in Ukraine, stating, "Technicians from the company Cine Engineering gathered near a rural village to train drone pilots entering a new field of swarm technology called Pasika (Ukrainian for "nourishment center")." The article continued, "At the heart of the Pasika hardware is a wireless modem, which uses a small frequency-hopping transceiver to act as a signal for the flying drones."
During flight, each quadcopter updates its altitude and position multiple times by measuring the difference in arrival times between radio signals from multiple known locations. The Pasika software also supports automated flight control.
In its current development phase, a single pilot can manage dozens of drones, autonomously launching, navigating, and hovering. In the pre-attack phase, a large fleet of drones can be on standby, awaiting the command to attack.
In a multi-day training session for the quadcopter team, Pavlo, a former infantryman and liaison to Cine Engineering's combat brigade, led the pilots.
While the technology is cutting-edge, the training grounds are typical of the Ukrainian countryside. The AI drone testing grounds were hectares of hayfields and sunflower fields, safely protected behind fences and unsupervised by control towers.
The pilots, including pilots from the 3rd Army Corps' Kraken 1654th Unmanned Systems Regiment and the Samosud Team, a drone unit from the 11th Defense Brigade, worked in casual attire and colorful T-shirts, eating delivered pizza.
A small horse, tied to a stake next to a wooden cart, munched on grass and formed a flat circle.
The pilots took turns using an app to launch their drones and command them to navigate to a point on a map. Without human intervention, the quadcopters soared into the air, zoomed over the countryside, and hovered together about a mile away. Tablet screens displayed their progress.
The New York Times reporter reported, "The video feed from each quadcopter showed the rolling farmland below. The pilots released their controls, and a rusty tractor slowly passed by."
Two days after a Ukrainian AI drone attacked a Russian armored vehicle, the Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions, a Russian drone manufacturer located outside Moscow, released its analysis of a crashed Bumblebee recovered near the front lines.
The project nicknamed the quadcopter "Marsianin," based on the assumption that the prototype originated from NASA's Ingenuity program, which developed small autonomous helicopters for flight on Mars.
The report's authors declared that Ukraine possesses an AI-enhanced drone capable of "completely independently" flying complex routes and maneuvers in "complete radio silence."
The New York Times stated that the drone "can even fly independently of a human pilot."
The following month, the Coordination Center for Support and Development of Novorossiya, a Russian far-right nationalist group that trains and equips Russian soldiers, released a second 49-page report, stating, "We discovered a photo of Bumblebee, posted by a Reddit user, obtained from a discarded Michigan National Guard facility in late 2024." Author Aleksandr Lyubimov, who organizes combat drone exhibitions in Russia, reiterated the US connection, stating, "Based on this evidence, we believe Bumblebee has some connection to the United States."
According to a sales brochure distributed in Ukraine, the AI drone's resistance to jamming (GPS jamming) is partly due to "redundant communication," namely radio frequency hopping and visual inertial navigation—technical solutions to signal jamming.
The brochure claims a "direct hit rate of over 70% with autonomous terminal guidance," and Schmidt's quadcopter is also capable of autonomous target recognition. Pilots overlay bright green rectangles on objects of interest in their video feeds, highlighting potential targets—including infantry, bunkers, vehicles, and other aerial drones—before human pilots can spot them. This combination of capabilities creates a more robust and reliable autonomous strike capability than anything currently available.
The internet-controlled AI drones allow pilots to operate them from virtually anywhere, as long as their ground bases maintain a reliable Wi-Fi or broadband connection, away from frontlines and other potential weapons.
The New York Times reported, "This was demonstrated last summer when Schmidt visited Kyiv and witnessed a Kartia team piloting a Bumblebee outside Kharkiv, deployed by ground crews. According to the footage and people familiar with the mission, the drone crossed the line and attacked a four-wheel-drive Russian military van, the Buhanka, from about 300 miles away."
The AI drones, which have attracted billionaire investment, are now part of an experimental pack, not a one-off project.
The New York Times reported that "Operation Schmidt" was delivered to Ukrainian forces in early 2025, according to another sales pamphlet. The drone, a medium-range fixed-wing strike drone with a two-meter wingspan, features AI-based target recognition, terminal strike guidance, and anti-jamming communications and navigation systems, much like the existing Bumblebee.
The pamphlet also promised an 11-pound payload, a cruising speed of 62 miles per hour, and a range exceeding 90 miles.
The pamphlet stated, "Our AI-powered platform adapts to changing conditions without human intervention and processes battlefield data in real time. Deploy at scale to neutralize more targets at a fraction of the cost of existing systems and achieve overwhelming force multiplier against sophisticated threats."
The pamphlet also stated that "future monthly production volumes exceed 6,000 units."
Ukrainian AI drone company Schmidt is working to counter the Shahed, an Iranian-designed long-range drone used by Russia.
Shahed strikes Ukrainian cities almost every night. In July 2025, Schmidt and President Zelenskyy announced a strategic partnership focused on AI-powered drones, specifically an interceptor system known as Merops.
Ukraine was currently developing its own human-piloted anti-Shahed drone and had some early successes.
Ukrainian officials told the New York Times that Schmidt's AI drone, the Merops, was more effective than Iran's Shahed, saying, "The Merops has a 95 percent accuracy rate."
Ukraine combat-tested it, and the Merops is now deployed on NATO's eastern flank.
While Ukrainian pilots and officers say Schmidt's product is more promising than most, reviews of the Bumblebee have not been entirely positive.
The weapon lacks a night-vision camera, limiting its daytime flight.
Russian technology analyst Lyubimov described the drone as lacking weather resistance. "The design has many 'early-life flaws,'" he wrote.
Technicians for Ukraine's flagship AI drone, Schmitt, are available on the Signal app and can respond to suggestions. Serhiy, a Bumblebee combat pilot and senior technical consultant at Kartia, an early AI drone, told the Times that "initially, we couldn't fly without a professional pilot, but now we can fly with a rookie." He added that they tested 15 semi-autonomous apocalyptic attack drones from various manufacturers, and that Bumblebee was the best, and a new generation with a more powerful airframe and night-vision optics is in development.
Beyond integrating new technologies into operations, the hardware upgrades also set the drone apart from other drones by adding firmware and flight software, BeeQGroundControl, and getting things started.
In the Ukrainian attack, three Bumblebees and a standard FPV drone destroyed a 152mm howitzer protected under a log-roofed bunker inside Russia. The first Bumblebee dived into the camouflage netting and set it on fire, the second breached the roof, and shortly after, the standard FPV entered the area. The final Bumblebee hovered overhead and scattered 10 small anti-personnel mines around the area.
These consecutive combined attacks were timed to less than two minutes.
Despite the Ukrainian AI drone Bumblebee's various attack tactics, which combined various autonomous capabilities, Ukrainian officials stated that Schmidt engineers had not programmed the AI drone weapon to operate fully autonomously.
An anonymous Bumblebee pilot told the New York Times, "Like the NORDA Dynamics underdog, Bumblebee needs a human to designate its target before it attacks. I think the final decision should be left to the human."
Schmidt agreed, recalling his previous television appearance in 2024 where he worried about "a 'Dr. Strangelove' situation, where autonomous weapons make their own decisions." He added, "That would be terrifying."
The Ukrainian battlefield, which has become a demonstration ground for AI weapons, and the Israeli attack on Hamas and airstrikes against Iranian targets, where AI-based attacks gained absolute dominance, demonstrated how ceasefire negotiations are easily disrupted by strategic mutual access and how they are becoming ineffective in a new arms race. Under the Lee Jae-myung administration, a 150 trillion won AI fund and AI weaponization strategy are being strengthened on the Korean Peninsula, in conjunction with the largest US private equity fund.
The Lee Jae-myung administration's "AI-ization of defense" structure appears to mimic the hardline conservative strategy of the Netanyahu administration in Israel, which structured AI-based offensive weapons systems to make war easy to start and ceasefire negotiations impossible.
AI weapons, driven by a "compete or die paradigm," have rapidly pushed semi-autonomous weapons into new areas.
The New York Times reported, "X-Drone initially combined various forms of autonomous technologies into a long-range drone. The software transports the weapon to remote locations like ports, using computer vision to identify and attack specific targets such as warships, fuel storage tanks, and parked aircraft."
Drones equipped with the X-Drone software initially also struck trains carrying fuel and expensive Russian air defense radar systems, clearing a path for more drones to follow. Andriy, a mid-range strike drone pilot, told the Times that he had conducted more than 100 AI-enhanced missions using the company's software by 2025.
His job involved flying reconnaissance missions to areas where valuable targets had been detected, then handing control over to the software for a final strike. During one such mission this fall, the drone struck a mobile air defense system.
In the case of AI-enhanced weapons, the ethical differences between drones attacking large inanimate objects and drones autonomously hunting humans are significant.
The technical gap is narrowing, and X-Drone has already made the transition from inanimate objects to humans, the Times reported. "X-Drone has developed an AI-enhanced quadcopter that, according to its founder, can attack Russian soldiers with or without human intervention. While the software claims to be able to 'automatically abort selective attacks' via a remote pilot, in practice, a communications failure could render human control impossible."
The New York Times reported that he said, "In the event of a communication failure, the drones could hunt independently," adding, "It's unclear whether this is still happening."
Regarding the combat model in which semi-autonomous weapons are trained to track people, Asaro of the Stop Killer Robots campaign warned, "We're deeply concerned about entering this uncharted moral territory. Computer programs that apply rules to sensor data patterns shouldn't be determining people's fates."
"These things will decide who lives and who dies without access to morality," he said. "That's the essence of digital dehumanization. They have no morality. Machines don't understand the distinction between inanimate objects and people," he told the Times.
Yuri, a former doctor who became a new AI drone pilot in the Ukraine War, told the New York Times that "the war should have been stopped early."
Meeting him at the firing range where Pavlo trained pilots using Cine-Engineering technology, the New York Times said he was a FPV platoon leader in a frontline brigade and had participated in some of the most crucial battles of the war, including the 2024 Kursk invasion, and was working as a doctor in Western Europe when the all-out Russian invasion began.
Now, as a frontline doctor killing Russian soldiers, he suggests that prescribing antibiotics to kill microbes to prevent the spread of infectious diseases is a similar public service to attacking Russian soldiers.
"Now we're killing bugs too," he told the New York Times. "They're just bigger bugs." He added that "the war should have ended sooner."
Yuri, who was at the forefront of Ukraine's adoption of drone warfare, has witnessed numerous new weapons. In his view, AI-powered drones were inevitable.
He said, "Large-scale wars bring forth demons," adding, "They unleash powerful forces and accelerate developments that would otherwise have taken decades."
In World War I, the widespread use of chlorine, phosgene, and sulfur mustard, along with the deployment of combat aircraft, tanks, and artillery, escalated the warfronts into a global war. World War II ended after the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.
Regarding the war in Ukraine, he said, "Who knows what this war might unleash?" "If the international community was concerned about this, it should have stopped the war sooner."
The New York Times stated, "Historically, revolutionary weapons like the proliferation of combat drones in Ukraine are rare. They force tectonic shifts in military tactics, budgets, doctrine, and culture."
Innovative new weapons create the optimal conditions for the outbreak and escalation of war.
Organizations that adapt to new capabilities and risks can rapidly thrive, while the burden of harm is concentrated on soldiers who are not subjected to humiliation and suffering on the battlefield. In a system accelerating with the integration of new weapons and autonomy, the rapid evolution of drones is a moment analogous to Japan's expansion into World War II, triggered by the rise of the machine gun during the Russo-Japanese War, the New York Times reported.
The machine gun, introduced with American support by Japan to subjugate local warlords and consolidate militarism, proved its effectiveness at the Siege of Port Arthur in 1904, establishing militarism as a foundation for the expansion of the war.
While the Russian Tsarist army was numerically superior, comprised of peasants and drunkards, the Imperial Japanese Army was highly motivated and disciplined. When the Japanese assaulted fortified Russian positions with a massive infantry assault, they charged into machine gun positions, unprecedented in state-to-state warfare, and broke the line.
Western military attachés were present on the battlefield to observe the events, and the incident was deeply ingrained. Yet, most countries failed to take notice.
The New York Times attributed the escalation of World War II to the introduction of new weapons, stating, "European armies, completely unaware of the impact machine guns would have on their soldiers' fates, fed their cavalry horses and preached the glories of open-field charges." "A decade later, incompetent generals lost young lives on the Western Front, and those who were out of touch with the technology of the day were left behind."
Russia announced on the 1st that a Ukrainian drone strike killed 24 people, including children, in the Kherson region of eastern Ukraine, which is under Russian control.
The Lee Jae-myung administration has shifted its strategy in negotiations with the United States to prioritize the acquisition of military nuclear weapons over the construction of nuclear submarines.
On the 31st, ahead of the South Korea-China summit on the 4th, National Security Office Director Wi Seong-rak told the newspaper "Hunkyeore" that he "plans to discuss the peace and denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which we have been working on so far." In response to a question about the "denuclearization phrase in the joint statement," he stated, "We will proceed with such discussions. The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is a matter of common interest for all surrounding countries. If denuclearization becomes completely impossible in this region, the subsequent situation will not benefit anyone. Tensions will escalate, and everyone will have to consider their next move for the sake of security. That will not benefit China or Russia either," indicating that he was pressuring China.
See <Lee Jae-myung's 'AI-powered killer drones and autonomous machine guns in the Ukraine War', July 29, 2025>
<Lee Jae-myung's 'coexistence and co-prosperity' concealment of military buildup; Chung Dong-young's 'North Korea-US summit priority'; Socialist economy undermining; December 19, 2025>
<UN Secretary-General: 'AI a threat to peace'; Lee Jae-myung's 'military acceleration and AI leap forward' attack; September 25, 2025>
<Trump's Imperial Presidential System, Lee Jae-myung Regime Supports 'April North Korea-US Summit' Election, December 22, 2025>