What India Should Take From Ukraine’s Delta

Picture a Ukrainian drone spotting a Russian target. Before Delta came into use early in Russia’s full invasion in 2022, getting that sighting to someone who could strike it took up to 72 hours, Lt Col Yurii Myronenko told Business Insider in November 2025, when he was Ukraine’s deputy defence minister for innovation. The target had often moved by then. By late 2025, Delta had brought it down to about two minutes.

Delta is a shared map. Satellite images, radar, drone feeds and reports from front-line units all go onto it, and the navy sees the same picture as the air force. About 90% of Ukrainian combat units use it. By September 2024 an AI tool inside it was flagging up to 12,000 pieces of Russian equipment a week from drone and camera footage. By 2025 Delta’s AI was catching 70% of enemy vehicles in a feed, each in about 2.2 seconds.

Not every strike takes two minutes, and Myronenko is clear about that. Weather, terrain, the target and how ready a unit is still decide the pace.

How they built it

A volunteer group, Aerorozvidka, built the first version in 2015. The Defence Ministry’s innovation centre develops it now. The government approved it for the Defence Forces in February 2023. In August 2025 the defence minister ordered it rolled out at every level.

Soldiers shaped it. Units tested it constantly and sent feedback, and Kyiv kept changing the system to fit. It runs on a laptop, tablet or phone.

An operator watching a live drone feed can drop a marker straight onto the map, and other units see it. Myronenko says the forces moved from paper maps to a digital platform that shows the front as it is.

Call it human-centred design if you want. In practice it meant watching soldiers use the system and fixing what slowed them down. Lyuba Shipovich, who runs the Ukrainian tech NGO Dignitas Ukraine, says tools like Delta have sharply cut friendly fire.

The government also let Delta run in the cloud outside Ukraine to protect it from missile and cyber attacks. Shipovich says it works offline, while Palantir’s tools mostly sit in command centres with good internet.

At NATO’s Hedgehog exercise in Estonia in May 2025, ten Ukrainian drone specialists embedded with Estonian units brought Delta with them. Their side put two battalions out of action in a single day, a participant told a Wall Street Journal columnist.

India

On a single night during Operation Sindoor, Pakistan sent 300 to 400 drones at 36 locations along India’s western border, Col Sofiya Qureshi told a government briefing. Each sighting had to reach someone who could act on it, fast. That is the gap Delta closed for Ukraine.

The Army has named 2026 its Year of Networking and Data Centricity, with real-time decisions as a goal.

Whatever the Army uses has to work offline. Posts in Ladakh and Arunachal can’t count on a network. The system needs to run on the soldier’s own device and sync when the link comes back.

Put it in front of the people on watch early, at border posts, gun positions and ops rooms. Then keep changing it based on what they say. If they need a manual, nothing else it does matters.