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As I wrote in my latest piece, the threat from Russia is escalating. The prospect of entering another winter with a finite supply of air-defence interceptors is deeply concerning. Russia isn’t waiting. It is bombing us now, increasingly with the support of North Korean missiles, while Ukraine faces difficult choices over which threats it can realistically intercept. This isn’t a problem for the future. It’s happening today.

Ukraine is opening a new chapter in the warfare of the future. Ukrainian forces have carried out their first aerial assault in which robots were delivered to the battlefield by drones. Heavy drones are now used not only to strike, but to carry ground robots close to russian positions. A drone lifts a robot into a dangerous zone, drops it, and the robot then moves on its own to carry out its combat mission. This solves a basic problem with ground robots. They are slow, they get stuck, and they are often destroyed long before they reach the target. Delivered by air, combat platforms arrive faster, reach farther, and no Ukrainian soldier has to drive them into fire. It appears to be the first known case of one drone delivering another robotic system directly into combat. The purpose is to save soldiers’ lives – and to make russia fight robots on the ground as well as drones in the sky.