UNITED NATIONS: Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived at the green marble rostrum with the cadence of a wartime prosecutor and the vocabulary of an engineer. In a taut, unsparing address to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, the Ukrainian president said the world has already slipped into “the most destructive arms race in human history.” He argued that unless Russia’s invasion is decisively contained and the rules for military AI are drawn now, this era will normalize drone-on-drone combat, autonomous strike decisions, and attacks on power grids and hospitals with no human eye on the trigger.
His thesis cut against two comforting stories diplomats still tell themselves in these halls: that deterrence by alliance remains enough, and that old arms control frameworks can be stretched to cover new weapons. Zelenskyy urged a rewrite of the rulebook before the machines outrun the lawyers. He paired that appeal with a blunt political message: Vladimir Putin, he argued, is testing not only Ukraine’s resilience but the international system’s appetite for risk, probing airspace, sea lanes, and political fault lines from the Baltic to the Black Sea and beyond. “Stop Russia’s war, or face the consequences of a far larger conflict, the most destructive arms race ever,” he said, a warning reflected in contemporaneous reports from AP.
The room shifted as delegates paged through talking points that suddenly felt out of date. In recent years, every major conflict has been a laboratory for unmanned systems and countermeasures, from Gaza and Sudan to the Red Sea and the Donbas. But Ukraine’s battlefield has produced something else: scale. Hundreds of thousands of small first-person-view (FPV drones) have turned trench lines into grids of surveillance and precision, while long-range strike drones have taught civilians what it means to live under the constant possibility of a buzzing, off-camera threat. This is the “arms race” Zelenskyy described: not a nuclear sprint, but a software sprint built on algorithms for target recognition, loitering munitions that can wait for a radio whisper, jammers strong enough to carve dead zones into the map, and, increasingly, autonomy that makes engagement loops shorter than a commander’s breath.
In the near term, Zelenskyy said, the invasion’s perimeter is wider than the front line. He pointed to incidents in NATO airspace, including fresh GPS interference near Kaliningrad, to sabotage risks against undersea cables and energy platforms, and to pressure campaigns against vulnerable neighbors. He named Moldova as a current target of disinformation and political destabilization, echoed by recent arrests tied to a Russia-linked plot. The pattern, he argued, is not subtle: normalize the abnormal at Ukraine’s expense, then replicate it where the response appears weaker or the legal gray zone is wider. He tied that risk to a broader loss of confidence in global institutions, noting that resolutions and emergency sessions, however symbolically important, have not stopped the shells falling on Kharkiv or the drones diving on Odesa.
Across Europe, leaders have been moving toward his vocabulary. Baltic and Central European presidents, some speaking minutes after Zelenskyy, warned about hybrid attacks and supply chain sabotage. Maritime nations discussed new security centers to protect critical North Sea assets from unmarked vessels. Pilots reported GPS interference near Kaliningrad. If the first year of the invasion forced allies to relearn artillery math, the third has been a seminar on infrastructure risk.
Zelenskyy’s appeal on AI found rare consensus in the chamber. Even governments at odds over Gaza or the Sahel see common interest in avoiding a future where autonomous weapons proliferate faster than norms. The secretary-general has floated a framework for limiting such systems; Kyiv’s twist is to ground that framework in battlefield evidence and the hard economics of mass production. Ukrainians have learned, often painfully, where autonomy helps and where it horrifies. They have also learned that once cheap, capable drones reach a reliability threshold, every budget officer becomes a strategist and the arms race accelerates from the bottom up.
For Ukraine, that race is daily life. Soldiers describe the front as an ecology of machines: FPVs for close work, fixed-wing scouts for mapping, electronic warfare (EW) units creating moving cones of silence, counter-FPV guns that feel more like IT support than air defense. Commanders rotate units to align with the shifting RF landscape. Logisticians measure success in batteries and propellers. The country’s defense industry, once a patchwork of small shops and volunteer garages, now competes for formal contracts and exports. That ecosystem gives Zelenskyy credibility when he asks for guardrails. It also gives him leverage: when your products are buying time for cities, your voice on the standards board carries weight.
None of this makes the war less brutal. The strikes that puncture apartment blocks and power stations are not novel; the injuries on the operating tables are not new. What is new is the speed at which cheap autonomy is learning to do complicated things. Engineers in multiple countries are already fielding drones optimized to hunt other drones, tuned for predictive intercepts. ISR tools are being paired with language models that can sift radio chatter and flag anomalies. Battlefield orchestration platforms are creeping toward suggested courses of action that, in a crunch, will become default actions if commanders trust a machine’s confidence score. Zelenskyy’s point is that this ceiling is getting lower, and that the moment to raise it with law is brief.
For the United Nations, the question is institutional: can a system built to register state behavior govern the logic of networked weapons that can be bought off the shelf, traded on Telegram, and updated over the air. Treaties that constrained nuclear testing and chemical stockpiles were born from catastrophe and enforced by a club of states that owned the means of annihilation. The drone age is messier. Teenagers design airframes that show up at the front within weeks. Black-market chips become guidance brains. Civilian shipping containers arrive as agricultural equipment and leave as field repair shops. The governance Zelenskyy imagines will have to be more agile and more intrusive than the UN is used to, and it will have to include the companies that write and train the code.
The geopolitics are no kinder. Kyiv’s pitch landed in a Washington still recalibrating its posture toward Russia and in European capitals that sense their defense industries are not ready for a long contest. In the United States, support for Ukraine remains framed by a debate over priorities and strategy. The administration speaks more bluntly now about the Kremlin’s aims, yet appropriations have been slower and sanctions logic more incremental than many in Kyiv had hoped. Zelenskyy’s response is to narrow the moral and technical gap: argue that if AI-enabled warfare is the next normal, then Ukraine’s fight is not charity but preemption, an investment in rules that will save money and lives later.
He also tried to widen the coalition map. The address highlighted the participation of more than 30 countries in Ukraine’s defense coalition and invited nontraditional partners, states with advanced electronics sectors or regional drone expertise, to plug into a system of shared testing and training. That pitch doubles as a hedge against fatigue: the broader the industrial base that adopts a standard, the harder it becomes for any one capital to unwind it. The idea aligns with what he and his team briefed during UNGA week, reflected in Reuters’ live coverage.
Back in Kyiv, where sirens still divide the day, the president’s bluntest line may have been the one least likely to trend: alliances matter, but institutions matter more. The war has been a master class in coalition management, and Ukrainians know the value of timely air defenses and fresh artillery barrels. They also know that coalitions are fickle and that norms, once lost, are hard to rebuild. “Do not outsource the future to battlefield improvisation,” Zelenskyy said in so many words. “Write it down.”
The chamber’s reaction was that familiar mix of applause and equivocation. Some delegations leaned forward, ready to translate wartime lessons into export controls and shared registries. Others kept their heads down, wary of any doctrine that might boomerang back on their own security services. A few invoked sovereignty as a catchall to resist what they cast as Western rule-making. Yet even among skeptics there was little dispute about the direction of travel. The question is not whether AI will define the next decade’s warfare, but whether politics can keep pace.
For Ukraine, the calendar is more compressed. Winter is coming, with it the season of drones: cold air that thickens prop-wash, long nights that double the hours of danger, vulnerable grids that invite smart munitions to test the line between hardship and terror. The air defenses across Europe’s northeast are already on a hair trigger, and each intercept feeds the next alert. The recent dispute over Estonian airspace and the Spanish GPS disruption near Kaliningrad show how narrow the margin has become. The arms race Zelenskyy named is not theoretical on the Dnipro; it whistles, dives, and blooms. His General Assembly speech tried to make that sound audible in New York. The task before the UN, and before capitals that still claim stewardship of the international order, is to prove they heard it and to answer with rules that can survive contact with the future.
Whether that future is written in New York or on the steppe will depend on choices far from the front: budgets that fund sensors instead of slogans, export regimes that treat algorithms as munitions, prosecutors who build cases against commanders who delegate lethality to code, and voters who understand that deterrence in this era is less about ships in formation and more about standards embedded in software. Zelenskyy’s gamble is that a war-tested country can force that conversation faster than peacetime ever would. The cost of losing that bet will not be measured only in Ukrainian lives.
As delegates spilled into side rooms, a warren of bilateral photo ops and earnest communiqués, the outlines of next steps began to take shape. European ministers compared notes on maritime surveillance and energy grids. Legal advisers sketched the bones of an AI weapons registry modeled on chemical precursors lists. Defense attachés swapped cards with Ukrainian entrepreneurs now building unmanned systems at scale. None of it ensures momentum. It does suggest that, for at least one afternoon, the United Nations heard a wartime leader describe a technology problem like a policy problem, and then dared to imagine that the right forum for both was the same room.
