The ex-head of Roscosmos, Dmytro Rogozin, said that Russia has sent 4 out of 5 unmanned ground vehicles (UAVs) “Marker” that will be equipped with anti-tank weapons to the front in eastern Ukraine.

“The first four “Marker” works arrived in the region on time. We are starting to upload images of targets, develop battle algorithms as part of a group of combat robots and install powerful anti-tank weapons,” he said on his Telegram channel, sharing a video with the Russian UGVs.

Military analyst Sam Bendett, who specializes in robotic systems and artificial intelligence, also notes that Rogozin allegedly coordinated the creation of hardened centers where the Russian military would be trained to use these UGVs and where additional units would be produced.

The announcement of the placement of these weapons systems in Ukraine comes in the context of the fact that, after months of discussions and negotiations, Ukraine’s Western partners in January approved the shipment of Western-made tanks to Kyiv.

Currently, these are 31 American Abrams tanks, 14 British-made Challenger 2 tanks and about 80 German-made Leopard 2 tanks.

Among the promised models, the British tanks will most likely be the first to arrive in Ukraine.

What is known about Russian anti-tank works

Last week, Dmytro Rogozin, who currently heads a group of Russian military advisers that calls itself the Tsarist Wolves, told the RIA Novosti news agency that the tanks that the West will send to Ukraine can expect a combat encounter with a modified version of the Marker. UGV, they will be armed with anti-tank missiles.

“Everyone agrees with that [roboții] our attack markers must be ready to destroy them (western tanks) with all crews in the time remaining before arrival [tancurilor] Abrams and Leopard in Ukraine,” the ex-head of Roscosmos emphasized.

The military website Task & Purpose notes that these UGVs, some of which are tracked and others wheeled, were developed by Android Technologie and the Foundation for Advanced Research, Russia’s equivalent of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). USA.

“What’s interesting is that Marker has always been presented as a concept, a flagship project for general AI applications,” Samuel Bendett told Task & Purpose.

It states that sending the Marker UAV to Ukraine is quite questionable, as the systems were previously tested mainly for intelligence gathering and reconnaissance.

New Russian propaganda training?

Bendett also explains that while they have been tested in challenging environments such as forests, none of them compare to the chaos Marker systems will encounter in real combat situations.

“They may have undergone secret testing that we don’t know about. But Donbas is not a controlled environment. It is loaded with weapons and countermeasures,” he says.

However, Task & Purpose journalists remind us that Russia has a tradition of testing new technologies on the battlefield. For example, the military command in Moscow in 2018 approved the deployment of the Uran-9 system, which is an unmanned combat vehicle (UMV), in Syria.

But the weapon had numerous problems, from an effective range of only 300-500 meters to frequent malfunctions and loss of control by operators.

Even Russian defense officials have admitted that the Uran 9 UCGV was unable to perform its tasks.

However, it entered service with the Russian armed forces, and last year Moscow state media announced that Uranus-9 had been sent to Ukraine.

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