Techno-Nationalism

Chapter 19Drones, Robots and Autonomous Weapons

During the night of February 22, 2024, off the coast of Crimea, Ukrainian unmanned surface vehicles (USV) armed with high explosives, bounced and weaved through the waves toward the Sergey Kotov, a Russian naval patrol ship. In what would soon go viral on the Internet, black and white erratic video pictures showed the Sergey Kotov being rocked by massive explosions before it listed to its port-side and sank.¹

The weapon of choice was reportedly a Ukrainian made Magura V5 drone,² equipped with autopilot, video subsystems and night vision capabilities as well as communication links to remotely operated airborne drones in the vicinity—which, in turn, were most likely accessible because of space-based Internet supplied by Starlink.

The USV that sent the Sergey Kotov to the bottom of the Black Sea looked like an oversized toy that model boat builders would take to a local lake on a weekend. Its streamlined shape and small size made it the ultimate example of asymmetric fighting power. Fully loaded, the Magura V5 cost an estimated US$250,000, while the Russian Naval vessel it sank, many times its size, cost around US$65 million to build.

A month before the destruction of the Sergey Kotov, in what can only be described as a surreal, cross-dimensional war-think exercise, the Ukrainian military conducted an online ‘hackathon’ with interested parties from all over the world, seeking to promote Project Fury—an open-sourced initiative to ...