CSIS fellow analyzing Russia's AI-enabled warfare systems
Kateryna Bondar
Profile
Most analysts writing about AI and warfare are doing it from the outside — extrapolating from policy papers, vendor pitch decks, and Pentagon press releases. Kateryna Bondar is one of the few writing from the inside. A fellow at the CSIS Wadhwani AI Center, she spent years inside Ukraine’s government — first as a project manager at the National Reforms Council and the Ministry of Finance during the post-2014 reform push, then advising on defense, financial sector, and innovation reforms. She did a stint at PwC running technical assistance projects for Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, and earlier worked in financial control at Microsoft. She was a Ukrainian Emerging Leaders fellow at Stanford’s CDDRL in 2019–2020.
What makes her work valuable is that she treats AI in warfare as an engineering problem, not a science-fiction one. Her CSIS reports are unusually concrete: how many AI-enabled drones Ukraine actually fielded last year (about 10,000 of nearly 2 million total), what percentage of Russian fire missions now run through unmanned systems (up to 80 percent), how command-and-control software is being rewritten on the fly under jamming pressure, and which parts of the kill chain still keep a human in the loop. This is the closest thing to ground truth you can read about how machine learning, computer vision, and autonomy stacks behave when they’re deployed against an adversary that’s actively trying to kill them.
For anyone building with AI, Bondar’s reporting is a useful corrective to two failure modes: the Silicon Valley assumption that benchmark performance translates cleanly into the field, and the policy-class assumption that “lethal autonomous weapons” are still hypothetical. She documents a real ecosystem — Russia is sprinting to build a sovereign drone industry around applied AI; Ukraine is iterating weekly on models trained on classified battlefield data. Whatever you think about the ethics, the deployment numbers are the largest live experiment in autonomous systems anywhere on Earth. She’s the writer to read on it.
She’s also become a regular voice in The New York Times, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Breaking Defense, and CNN, and has briefed the U.S. Helsinki Commission on Western defense-cooperation models with Ukraine.
Key Articles & Papers
How Russia Is Building a Sovereign Drone Ecosystem for AI-Driven Autonomy How Russia Is Reshaping Command and Control for AI-Enabled Warfare Ukraine's Future Vision and Current Capabilities for Waging AI-Enabled Autonomous Warfare Understanding the Military AI Ecosystem of Ukraine How Ukraine's Operation Spider's Web Redefines Asymmetric Warfare The Russia-Ukraine Drone War: Innovation on the Frontlines and BeyondVideos
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