Inside Ukraine's Azov Drone R&D: The Engineer Building AI Weapons 18 km From the Front Line | Alexander Palamarchuk

August 27, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the trenches of eastern Ukraine, a drone engineer with the call sign "Paradise" works 18 kilometers from the front line, building the next generation of autonomous weapons. He serves with the Azov Corps of the Ukrainian National Guard, a unit that began using drones as early as 2014 with homemade models, then moved to DJI platforms for reconnaissance and light bombing. By the time Paradise joined in 2023, the unit was already shifting toward Ukrainian-made and partner-supplied drones, trying to replace Chinese hardware. But the central problem he faces every day is not building drones—it is keeping them connected in a battlefield saturated with electronic warfare.

The Three Ways to Keep a Drone Flying Through Jamming

Paradise divides drone communication into three categories: radio frequency (RF), fiber optic, and internet-based links. The classic approach uses standard RF bands like 2.4 GHz or LTE, but Russian jamming has made those increasingly unreliable. By early 2024, his unit had moved to custom Ukrainian-made radio systems that can sweep from 100 MHz to 3,000 MHz, hunting for clear frequencies. The catch is that jamming conditions vary dramatically by location—one position might be unusable while a spot five kilometers away works fine.

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What you'll learn

1 Inside Ukraine's Azov Drone R&D: The Engineer Building AI Weapons 18 km From the Front Line | Alexander Palamarchuk
2 Timestamped Outline
3 (00:00) **Opening: The Autonomous Weapons Question** - The host frames the central tension: the US says it won't develop fully autonomous lethal weapons for ethical reasons, but battlefield realities may override that stance.
4 (02:00) **Azov's Drone History** - Paradise explains when and how Azov first began using drone technology, starting years before the 2022 full-scale invasion.
5 (04:24) **Current Drone Roles** - Drones are now primarily used for reconnaissance rather than bombing, as the unit has bigger payload and longer flight time requirements.
6 (05:56) **The Jamming Problem: Three Categories** - Paradise breaks down the electronic warfare challenge into radio, fiber optic, and internet-based communication, explaining how each is countered.
7 (08:59) **Starlink on Drones** - Satellite-connected drones provide a significant advantage because they are nearly impossible to jam with conventional electronic warfare.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

The most consequential arms race in the world right now isn't nuclear, it's software. Craig Smith speaks with Alexander Palamarchuk, an engineer in the R&D department of Ukraine's Azov Brigade, calling in from approximately 18 kilometers from the front line in the Pokrovsk region. What emerges is one of the most technically candid accounts available of what drone warfare actually looks like from the inside: how Ukraine went from homemade reconnaissance drones in 2014 to AI-guided systems being developed and tested in real combat today, how the jamming arms race has forced his unit to develop custom frequency systems spanning 100 to 3,000 megahertz in a constant search for clean windows Russia hasn't yet closed, and why the tank - once the defining weapon of land warfare - has been reduced on the modern battlefield to a mobile jamming platform.

The most important distinction Alexander draws is one that rarely surfaces in mainstream coverage: AI already exists that can recognize and classify vehicles and people with high accuracy. The unsolved problem isn't recognition, it's discrimination, determining with certainty whether a recognized target is military or civilian. That gap is the only thing standing between today's AI-assisted drones and fully autonomous lethal systems, and Alexander puts the timeline for closing it at approximately two years. The US maintains an official policy of not developing fully autonomous lethal weapons for ethical reasons. On the battlefield 18 kilometers from where Alexander is speaking, that policy is being outpaced in real time, and he is clear that NATO's software advantage positions Western countries to win that race before anyone else gets there.

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