We didn't take much notice here but a bleak milestone was passed in Europe a couple of weeks ago. On January 11, in terms of time, Russia's war on Ukraine caught up with the country's battle against Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945. Three years, 10 months and 17 days.

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Of course the scale was much greater in World War II. Frontlines extending thousands of kilometres, millions of casualties, atrocities beyond the darkest imagination, unparalleled destruction. In this war, Russia assumed Ukraine would be a walkover. It's a bloody stalemate almost four years after it began.

Another milestone was also passed in January, which speaks more to the future than the past. Video emerged of three Russian soldiers surrendering to a Ukrainian robot, the UGV Droid TW 7.62. Bloodied, the Russians emerge from their hiding place, hands raised, before lying down in front of the machine.

Science fiction rendered as fact.

This was no cutesy droid from the Star Wars imagination but a tracked, heavily armed, AI-assisted, autonomous machine, designed to detect, track and capture or kill enemy troops. Two lines in the Facebook post by the manufacturer DevDroid announcing the capture speak volumes: "No risk for our fighters"; "What modern warfare looks like".

Lacking the manpower of its adversary, Ukraine has had to improvise and in so doing has changed the face of modern warfare. We've grown accustomed to vision of its remotely controlled aerial drones taking out armoured vehicles and individual soldiers. And we've seen the destruction wrought on the Russian navy by waterborne drones packed with explosives. Now, battlefield robots have entered the fray - and they're not just killing machines.

A few weeks ago, DevDroid announced it was beginning production of the wheeled Maul evacuation drone, designed to retrieve injured troops from the battlefield.

Necessity is the mother of invention and in this protracted fight for its existence Ukraine has become a world leader in the development of unmanned ground vehicles........

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