The Kyiv drone plant had an enviable problem. He could make more combat drones than Ukrainian military needs. The heavy ones, known as vampires, can be assembled at a rate of 4,000 per month, told me the founder of the factory during a visit to the establishment in March. The little ones, similar to the drones that Ukraine used this weekend to devastate the fleet of Russian bombers, could be manufactured several times faster, he said: around 4,000 a day.
All around us, the noise of the production chain made it difficult to hear, just like the speaker system playing music from the 80s (“I just died in your arms tonight … “). So I asked the founder to repeat himself: did he just say 4,000 drones … per day? “Yes, it’s up to full capacity,” he said. “Right now, we are only doing half of this.”
The attack on Sunday, which targeted the Russian air bases as far as Irekutsk, in eastern Siberia, used a total of 117 Kamikaze drones, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky. Each of them costs around $ 400 to produce, and they destroyed Russian planes worth billions. Through Ukraine, this would make this operation one of the most effective, Dollar for Dollar, in the history of war. Without a doubt, the agents behind the strike deserve to take a knot. But once Russian targets have stopped smoking in their bases, it may be useful to consider how these weapons will be used in the future, not only in Russia but in the world.
For the moment, the drones that Ukraine produces remains within the country, because the government has prohibited the export of weapons during the war. Once the war is over, these restrictions are likely to be lifted and Ukrainian drones could appear in the world market in abundance. Last year, Ukraine produced more than two million combat drones of different types. This year, it’s on the way to do twice as much.
For the government of kyiv, the foreign market for these weapons is an essential element of the reconstruction and rearmament plan after the war. A legislator said last year that the sale of drones to other countries could earn Ukrainian manufacturers some $ 20 billion, which could be reinvested in the national weapons industry.
The founder of the factory I visited in March told me that he had already received requests for purchase from several European countries, as well as Egypt, India and Pakistan. “They all know that our drones work because they have been tested in real fight,” he said, asking not to be appointed for security reasons.
Once these drones become widely available, governments around the world may need to rethink their military doctrines, as well as their protocols to keep senior officials.
Last fall, an officer of the military intelligence agency of Ukraine showed me a prototype of a new type of drone that had been used in many strikes in Russia. He looked like an airplane model with an explosive shell attached to his belly, and the officer said he had a range of at least a thousand miles. He was clearly proud of the ingenuity that had entered the development of the drone.
But as a security expert, he also wondered what would happen if these weapons find themselves in bad hands. “The protection of military objects will become much more difficult,” he told me. “The usual strategies will not work.”
