Sergey Sukhankin
Executive Summary:Russia has significantly increased its investment in artificial intelligence (AI), allocating a substantial portion of its state budget toward AI-driven military research. This funding aims to enhance Russia’s technological edge in modern warfare, particularly in AI-enabled military applications.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine marked the first major conflict with widespread AI use. Ukraine, supported by U.S. AI firms, successfully countered Russian forces, prompting Russia to accelerate AI integration in command systems, drones, and air defense networks.
Russia’s focus and rapid development of AI has given it an advantage against Western weaponry regardless of the outcome of its invasion of Ukraine.
Russia’s AI development traces back to early Soviet experiments in the 1960s. It was not after its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, however, that Russia’s military AI development accelerated.
On February 12, the leading European defense technology company, Helsing, based in Germany, announced that 6,000 HX-2 strike drones will be delivered to Ukraine (Helsing.ai, February 12). The drones are powered by onboard artificial intelligence (AI), rendering HX-2 immune to electronic warfare (EW) measures with its ability to search for, re-identify, and engage targets without a signal or a continuous data connection. The delivery of these drones follows a previous order of 4,000 HF-1 strike drones which are currently being delivered to Ukraine. Prior to this, Dmitry Chernyshenko, the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, announced massive investment of 5 percent of the state budget allocated to funding scientific research in AI and of 15 percent to other areas of research with the use of AI tools (Tsargrad.tv, January 31). One of the main purposes of this funding is to use AI technologies to solve applied military problems (Government of Russia, January 31). With technology taking a central role in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some Russian and foreign military experts referred to the growing use of AI as an upcoming “revolution in military affairs,” where Russia could become one of the world’s leading powers given its hands-on experience in its invasion of Ukraine (Discred.ru, January 14, 2024; Kommersant.ru, September 15, 2021; Focus.ua, May 26, 2023; Army.ric.mil.ru, January 10, 2022).
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