Open Seminar: Human in the Loop? Operator Labour in Ukrainian Drone Warfare

The second open seminar organised by the AI-WAR network at the Swedish Defence University takes the debate over human control of autonomous weapons to the Ukrainian front line.

That debate usually centres on the singular decision to use lethal force. Drawing on twelve in-depth interviews with drone operators serving in active combat, Olga Matveieva and Vasil Navumau shift the frame to the work that keeps drone systems running.

Matveieva and Navumau find that frontline drone operation predominantly involves maintenance, repair and coordination carried out on a shifting mix of state-procured systems, commercial quadcopters and volunteer-supplied equipment that must be constantly adapted to withstand electronic warfare, physical damage and supply failure. The operators themselves become components of the system. When operators are exhausted, the system degrades; when they rotate and recover, reliability is restored. Control in drone warfare runs in both directions: the system shapes the operator as much as the operator shapes the system. What, then, does human control mean when the labour of operators is compelled, distributed, and dependent on conditions that military institutions do not systematically provide?

Olga Matveieva is a habilitated doctor in sociology, a research fellow at Paderborn University in Germany, and associate professor at Dnipro University of Technology in Ukraine. Her research covers the societal and democratic implications of digital transformation in Eastern Europe, with a recent focus on collaborative practices of defence in Ukraine.

Vasil Navumau is a research fellow at the University of Siegen, where he is part of the Collaborative Research Centre project “Digital Publics and Social Transformation in the Maghreb” (B04). His broader research examines civic activism and its transformation through digital technologies in Belarus and Ukraine, with a current focus on how civilian digital workers become operators of wartime infrastructure. He also leads RADAR_BY, a Belarusian civil society initiative promoting civic technology, e-democracy and digital capacity-building for civil society organisations.