Pro-AIPerson

Volodymyr Zelensky

President of Ukraine

Ukraine’s wartime president has made AI central to national survival — scaling AI-guided drone warfare into the backbone of his country’s defense — while warning the UN that the world is living through “the most destructive arms race in human history.”

Politician

Wikipedia UN General Assembly address

In his words

We are now living through the most destructive arms race in human history because this time, it includes artificial intelligence.

— UN General Assembly, 2025

We need global rules now for how AI can be used in weapons. And this is just as urgent as preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

— UN General Assembly, 2025

Biography

Volodymyr Zelensky (born 1978), a comedian and actor who became president of Ukraine in 2019, has led his country through Russia’s full-scale invasion since February 2022. Outmanned and outgunned, Ukraine turned to technology as an equalizer — and under Zelensky it became the world’s live laboratory for AI at war.

AI as survival strategy

Ukraine’s drone forces — built up under Zelensky and his digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov — increasingly use AI for navigation, target recognition, and resistance to jamming, and by 2024–25 accounted for the majority of battlefield losses inflicted on Russian forces. In 2024 Ukraine adopted its WINWIN strategy, an explicit plan to become one of the world’s leading defense-AI states, and Zelensky has said drones and autonomous systems are the future of war, describing operations in which robotic units captured enemy positions without risking infantry.

The warning at the UN

Addressing the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2025, Zelensky delivered the paradox of his position: the man scaling AI weapons faster than anyone pleaded for global rules to govern them, warning it was “only a matter of time” before fully autonomous drones fight drones and strike people with no human involved. He put AI-weapons rules on par with nuclear nonproliferation. Skeptics note that Ukraine’s own roadmap pushes toward exactly the autonomy he warns of; his answer is that Ukraine did not choose this race — it can only refuse to lose it.