Ukraine's Varan school has trained over 1,000 ground robot operators since it opened in 2024, backed by roughly 47 million hryvnias from the Come Back Alive Foundation.
The School Behind the Robots
Varan is not simply teaching cadets to drive a tracked vehicle across a field. Its training ground is strewn with synthetic strands that imitate the fibre-optic lines left by drones at the front. Cadets practise working through enemy electronic warfare, FPV strikes and the threat of ambush. Every trainee also learns to fly a Mavic drone. Most ground-robot missions cannot be carried out without reconnaissance from above.
Training has to adapt as the battlefield keeps changing. A ground robot may move supplies or equipment without putting a person in its place. But it still needs an operator who can read the terrain, maintain a link and respond when the route becomes dangerous. Engineers from the robots’ manufacturers regularly visit Varan to collect results from field tests. What fails on the training ground can be taken back to the people building the machines.
The People and the Infrastructure
Lieutenant Colonel Vadym Kushch has run Varan since its founding. A career officer and veteran of Ukraine’s 54th Mechanised Brigade, he says the school’s biggest problem is a shortage of instructors: combat brigades are reluctant to release their best specialists. The instructors Varan does have bring combat experience and regularly return to the front. The lessons stay tied to conditions operators will actually face. The shortage remains.
Come Back Alive’s money has helped develop the training centre, establish a maintenance and repair station, and provide transport. It has also paid for the less glamorous essentials: a dining area, showers, shelter, a sports ground and underground barracks built around a buried cargo container. Cadets need somewhere protected to sleep and the means to keep equipment working if they are to learn effectively.
More than 1,000 graduates in two years is a substantial output for a specialist school, but Ukraine can build the robots and the facilities to train their crews only if experienced soldiers are also available to teach the next operators.
Varan’s instructor shortage shows the constraint alongside that achievement. The school’s output depends on combat veterans who can pass on what the front demands, and their scarcity remains the limiting factor even as funding and facilities expand.