At the doors of fourth year of warRussia still has not found a consistent formula to break the Ukrainian defenses, despite having more troops, a much more stable flow of material and a wide repertoire of advanced technologies that, on paper, should have tilted the battlefield. If the war in Eastern Europe was already a unprecedented laboratory of war technologies, Moscow has taken the most unprecedented step of all.
The problem that Russia is trying to solve. They counted in Forbes that, among the many causes of this below-expectation performance, there is one especially painful: the inability of many Russian officers on the front line to take quick tactical decisions and sustainable over time, precisely those that decide the outcome of local clashes that, accumulated, determine an entire offensive.
This deficit does not arise from nothing, but from the combination of a military culture rigidly hierarchicaldesigned to execute orders rather than improvise, and from a generation of extremely young commanders with limited experience, pushed to lead units in a type of combat that mercilessly punishes hesitation and rewards immediate adaptation.
The “soldier” Svod. The announced answer is Svod, a digital tool AI decision support system conceived as a tactical situational awareness system for front-deployed officers. Its function, according to the description of the Russian Ministry of Defensewould be to gather and merge in the same information space multiple sources of intelligence, from satellite data and aerial images to reconnaissance reports and open source material, to convert that chaos of signals into a common usable image.
From there, the system I would apply advanced processing and models assisted by artificial intelligence to analyze what comes in, project operational scenarios plausible futures and guide the command towards the most convenient course of action. The underlying intention is not hidden: to accelerate the decision cycle, reduce friction between “what is happening” and “what is ordered”, and guide managers towards rmost effective answers in an environment where every minute lost translates into casualties, burned material and wasted tactical opportunities.
Software connected to what already exists. Svod does not present itself as a device magical that a soldier hangs on his chest, but rather like a software architecture that is integrates into networks and media now available. It works as a layer that merges data and displays it to commanders on computers or tablets, with secure communications and decision support tools.
The important thing is the effect it produces: converting a crowded battlefield of signs into something that looks legible, and that the tactical command has concrete guidance when the environment changes faster than the upper echelons can keep up.
Deployment and focus. Furthermore, the plan wants to be implemented at full speed: after various operational tests in December 2025, it is expected to begin deploying it in April 2026 and extend it widely by September. In fact, the first units to receive it would be involved in the Pokrovsk axiswhere Russia concentrates part of its offensive effort.
That portrays it as an immediate solution to correct command and control failuresnot as a quiet modernization ten years from now, and explains why it is prioritized where wear is maximum and the margin of error is minimum.
A perverse incentive. In an army like the Russian one that rewards obedience and punishes improvisation, a local commander may be forced to attack even if he knows it is a bad idea. With constant pressure, some they execute and accumulate casualtiesothers seek to survive within the system by simulating results, sending small groups to mark their presence and using drones to appear successful.
In this context, Svod intends to push more coherent decisions with the real situation, giving a shared and more immediate vision to the front without touching the core of the model: continuing to command from above, but with a tool that reduces “surprises” and imbalances.
Minority Report in military version. There is no doubt, the bet has something of a futuristic scene that we had already seen in the cinema: just like works as Minority Report that had played with the idea of algorithms that anticipate the future, Russia seeks to anticipate what is going to happen before it happens, with that “soldier” called Svod that calculates, projects and recommends.
The promise is very easy to understand: if the system sees better and faster, it will be able to anticipate where the weak point is, when to press and when to readjust the attack. It is a way of turning combat into a prediction problemwhere human intuition and improvisation are replaced by a living map that attempts to order chaos.
What it can contribute. If it works well, Svod could improve identification of objectivescoordination and detection of gaps in the Ukrainian defense, as well as other similar tools have proven valuable in other armies. The problem, most likely, is that its effectiveness will clash with the reality of the front: electronic warfare, degraded communications, incomplete data, and models that fail when the enemy learn and change patterns.
In this sense, Ukraine has adapted quicklyand that makes it much more difficult for a system to accurately predict what will happen next. Still, the movement is more than significant: war is becoming a sensor competitionnetworks and decisions, and Russia is trying to have AI reduce a problem that has cost it too dearly.
Image | Ministry of Defense of Ukraine
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