Any comment by someone from hexbear.net when Ukraine is brought up.

Why not both? Robotics and autonomous systems are a large and growing niche in the CS area. Having both software experience and knowing how to wrench makes you a good candidate for a college lab doing interesting things. The caveat here is that you need to go to college because robotics is more specialized.

Source: my background is in physics and I got into my first lab because I spend a lot of my spare time trying to get a car from the 1950s with a botched everything to run.