Ukraine to boost its drone output to ‘dozens of thousands a month’ by year’s end

In their overlapping efforts to defeat Russia’s invading army while increasingly relying on domestic production of materials to obtain that objective, officials from Ukraine have said they’ll rapidly augment the number of drones the nation manufactures to tens of thousands per month.

Ukraine’s Minister for Strategic Industries Oleksand Kamyshin said the country will boost monthly domestic drone production from a current level of “a few thousand units” to tens of thousands by the end of this year. He revealed those intentions Tuesday while addressing a NATO-Industry Forum hosted by Sweden, where he offered insight into his nation’s efforts to transform its ongoing, somewhat sluggish counter-offensive into a turning point in the conflict.

“By the end of this year, it would be dozens of thousands a month,” Kamyshin said of Ukraine’s planned drone production increase from a rate he characterized as currently totaling a few thousand. “That’s something we grow even faster than conventional warfare ammunition and weapons.” 

Ukraine has previously announced expanding numbers of state and private companies producing drones for the defense effort – a figure Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal earlier this month put at over 200. That in part reflects Kyiv’s stated desire to rely as much as possible on domestic resources to battle Russia’s invasion in a manner that also stimulates a national economy that at one point was nearly shattered by the war. 

But it’s also based on Ukraine’s strategic reasoning for shifting its Army of Drones campaign from raising funds primarily for foreign craft purchases, to financing domestic manufacturing of the UAVs it needs for its defense.

Despite that well-publicized pivot, however, this week general news media featured belated (and doubtless overstated) reports about recently reinforced export restrictions imposed by China, and their purported effects of choking off supplies of DJI drones Ukraine has procured and deployed with considerable success against Russian forces. 

Consequences of those constricting controls by Beijing have indeed likely been perceptible in Kyiv’s supply activity. Yet the far earlier moves announced by Ukraine to kickstart and expand its own production of drones clearly demonstrated its long-standing wariness of becoming overly dependent on unpredictable foreign UAV sources – especially those from Russia-allied China.

One striking example of Ukraine moving to avert that trap of over-reliance has been its domestic output and extremely damaging use of munitions-carrying first person view drones. Since it launched the effort to mass-produce those UAVs, the craft have destroyed countless millions of dollars’ worth of Russian tanks, and even more armored vehicles transporting enemy troops. 

Meanwhile, the nation has welcomed fast-moving and highly innovative foreign UAV startups that have transplanted their activities to Ukraine to work alongside local peers and under instruction from the nation’s military command. Among the successes attributed to that development effort were some of the drone strikes that targeted critical military sites deep inside Russia’s own territory – and even buildings in central Moscow.

Image: Karl Greif/Unsplash