Vladimir Putin has created a monster — and it may destroy him.

As President Volodymyr Zelensky has made plain, Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine has brought on the age of war robots.

“For the first time in this war’s history, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms and drones,” Zelensky told defense industry workers last week.

“The occupiers surrendered, and this operation was completed without infantry involvement and without losses on our side.”

For the last four years, Russia’s big advantage in this war has been manpower.

It’s been able to flood the zone with troops in numbers Ukraine has struggled to match.

By replacing flesh-and-blood soldiers with mechanical recruits, Kyiv is negating that advantage.

It’s also opening the door to a nightmarish new type of warfare in which machines hunt down and exterminate humans.

Remote-control combat vehicles date back, ironically enough, to the “Teletanks” developed by the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

These were obsolete light tanks armed with flamethrowers to assault defended positions.

But they were difficult to control via unreliable radio connections, and the idea was soon dropped.

By the 1970s, small remote-controlled vehicles found a military niche in bomb disposal, but efforts to add weapons to these robots were unsuccessful.

And while the US deployed armed SWORDS/Talon robots to Iraq in 2007, they were never used in action, apparently due to concerns over reliability and the potential for bad publicity. 

The Russians did use Uran-9, a small robotic tank, in Syria, but the results were uneven; it suffered communication problems that left the vehicle stranded, and it has not been seen in Ukraine.

Navigation on the ground is more challenging than flying — which is why aerial drones are common but ground vehicles, from self-driving cars to sidewalk delivery robots, are still a novelty.

They easily get confused or stuck: In January, a delivery robot got caught on train tracks in Miami and was obliterated by a locomotive.

Ukraine has been tackling the challenge of effective ground robots, or Uncrewed Ground Vehicles, in the same way it evolved drones.

As with drones, the emphasis is on building low-cost systems that leverage commercial technology, getting them out into the field to generate real-world feedback, and iterating rapidly.

The Ukrainians say they can do in weeks what takes years in the West.

Finding a way around obstacles is still a challenge for Ukraine’s UGVs, so the robot operator is teamed with a drone crew with an overhead view to spot the best route.

Robots were initially used for logistics runs, carrying supplies the dangerous last few miles to the front line.

They have since taken on more demanding roles like casualty evacuation and mine-laying — and increasing numbers of videos show armed robots fighting at the front.

DevDroid is a typical example of a Ukrainian combat robot.

About the size of a quad bike, it has a top speed of 4 mph and packs a .50 caliber machine gun with 300 rounds.

Mykola Zinkevych, commander of the 3rd Assault Brigade, says a DevDroid occupied a front line position and fought off Russian troops solo with no soldiers present for 45 days, returning to base at intervals for recharging and reloading.

And, as Zelensky reported, Ukraine is also carrying out robot-only assaults with a mixture of drones and UGVs, using aerial drones to identify threats and point to targets for robot operators.

Such operations currently only involve a handful of machines, but Ukraine plans to produce 20,000 UGVs this year and could scale up rapidly.

In March, Andriy Biletskyi, commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, said that in 2026 UGVs would replace 30% of infantry at the front — and that the figure could rise to 80% in the near future.

Military analysts argue that robots can’t truly replace infantry until they can go inside buildings, occupy trenches and perform similar tasks requiring physical flexibility.

That might happen sooner than you think: The Ukrainian military has already experimented with dog-like quadruped robots, and recently took delivery of two US-made Phantom Mk1 humanoid robots for testing.

Kyiv has been a reluctant participant in the robot wars.

Its military has turned to technology out of sheer necessity, to reduce the need for soldiers on the front line and to cut casualties.

But Ukraine means to win — and if survival means sending in Terminator-like machines, the nation will not hesitate.

Putin’s invasion may finally break against a wall of unyielding robot soldiers, operated by crews many miles from the front line.

And that will change war everywhere, forever.

The battlefield of the future with be fully mechanized, and combatants facing each other directly will seem as quaint as fighting with swords.

David Hambling is the author of “Swarm Troopers: How Small Drones Will Conquer the World.”