Ukraine’s 427th Separate Unmanned Systems Regiment, known as Rarog, posted the unverified night-vision clip to its Telegram channel last month showing an interceptor closing on a one-way attack drone and a flash at the moment of contact. The unit flies Ukrainian-built interceptors alongside foreign systems, and did not specify which it used.

Foreign Policy Research Institute senior fellow Rob Lee shared the clip and called it the first public video he believed of Perennial Autonomy’s Merops, the American interceptor, “targeting Shahed/Geran one-way attack drones.”

The footage lands as the Army is moving to build a version of that drone it can call its own.

On June 23, the Army opened a Low-Cost Interceptor program at an industry day in Arlington, Virginia, seeking complete systems for under $1 million and government-owned designs it can hand to any manufacturer, with a first live-fire demonstration set for the fall.

The program would let the Army break the interceptor into pieces, buy or lease the design, and use contract manufacturers to build it — so it owns the weapon rather than depending on a single prime, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in May.

The Army does not own the Merops design and cannot produce them at will. The new program would change that, letting it hand a government-owned blueprint to any manufacturer rather than buy from only a single contracting company.

The vendor that the U.S government appears to be seeking independence from in this case is Perennial Autonomy, the maker of Merops.

Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt launched the defense startup in 2023 and signed a three-year, $500 million contract with the Pentagon in May — the largest single counter-drone deal it’s ever awarded — making the company uniquely influential to military supply chains.

The Pentagon turned to Merops after burning through hundreds of Patriot missiles defending against Iranian Shaheds, each Patriot costing more than $3 million and drawing down stockpiles Ukraine has long depended on for its own air defense.

The Army bought 13,000 Merops in eight days after the Iran war began in late February, at roughly $15,000 each, Driscoll told Congress in April.

“They protected U.S. troops,” the Army secretary told lawmakers, defending the cost as a fraction of what a Shahed costs to produce. “We will make that trade all day long.”

A Merops costs roughly $15,000 against a Shahed that runs $30,000 to $50,000.

The interceptor is a roughly three-foot, fixed-wing drone that flies up to 174 mph (280 km/h) and homes in on its target using thermal radar or radio-frequency sensors when its links are jammed.

It has downed more than 4,000 Russian drones in Ukraine, German production partner Twentyfour Industries said.

The system has conservatively accounted for 40% of all Shahed destruction in Ukraine, Brig. Gen. Curtis King, commanding general of the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, told reporters at a Polish base in November.

NATO has already built Merops interceptors into the forces protecting its eastern flank.

Romania folded Merops into its national air defenses on June 29, joining Poland in fielding it, and Lithuania bought 48 interceptors earlier this year. Officials said they are planning a deployment along the Danube corridor, where Russian drones have repeatedly crossed from the war next door, according to Reuters.

But the system still faces technical difficulties.

In mid-June, footage circulated of Merops interceptors failing to down a Russian drone, and a Romanian field test in April logged a failure the military attributed to “target maneuvering,” according to Greek publication Pronews. The outlet still called Merops one of the most effective low-cost tools in the drone war.

Ukraine’s military also flies an array of homegrown drones that run $1,000 to $3,000 a unit and have downed thousands of Russian drones since 2024, on a cost exchange that runs as steep as 85-to-1 in Kyiv’s favor.

Kyiv asked the Pentagon last August to help scale that manufacturing, offering to co-produce its cheap interceptors for the U.S.

Washington declined.

The Sea Baby, a strike boat built and operated by Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU, can now carry six to eight FPV drones in side compartments that open during an attack, alongside thermobaric Shmel rockets, according to Russian accounts of the boats operating around the Kinburn Spit, roughly 40 miles east of Odesa, shared by Forbes.

Ukrainian officials count on the autonomous vessels’ ability to move closer toward Russian military positions than land-based launchers could, with the SBU assuming a range of 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) on a 4,400-pound (2,000-kilogram) payload. Some of the drones in the cargo hold are guided by fiber-optic cable, leaving them immune to the radio jamming that downs ordinary FPVs, according to Forbes.

Ukraine has turned nearly everything it fields into an FPV launcher. Sea drones carrying fiber-optic FPVs struck the Russian ports of Tuapse and Novorossiysk in September. Several companies have rigged ground robots to fire the same drones, and both sides have flown balloons carrying them.

“The SBU became the first in the world to pioneer this new kind of naval warfare,” Brig. Gen. Ivan Lukashevych said at an unveiling of the Sea Baby’s latest generation in October 2025, “and we continue to advance it.”

Ukraine fields two distinct naval drone families.

The Sea Baby is developed and operated by the SBU, Ukraine’s domestic security service. The Magura – built by Uforce for the GUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate – is a separate system with its own lineage and export path.

The Sea Baby is primarily remote-piloted from a mobile ground station but carries AI-assisted targeting and navigation systems that allow it to operate autonomously when communications are jammed or degraded – a design imperative born from Russia’s intense electronic warfare environment over the Black Sea.

American forces have begun using the boats themselves.

U.S. special forces sank a target ship with a Ukrainian Magura at the Balikatan 2026 exercise off the Philippines on June 24, the first use of the technology in the Indo-Pacific.

The interest is not one-off. A cheap, expendable boat that can carry a cluster of attack drones to within striking range is exactly the kind of weapon the United States is looking for as it prepares for a possible war with China across the Pacific’s vast distances.

“Magura’s successes on the Ukrainian-Russian front confirm their value for use in the Indo-Pacific region,” Oleg Roginsky, chief executive of Uforce, the London-based startup that makes the Magura, told Bloomberg last week.

Uforce is in talks with Indo-Pacific buyers and weighing at least two production sites in the region, Roginsky said. Ukraine barred weapons exports in 2022 to keep its arms at the front, and only began opening that market in 2025.

Ukrainian naval drones have sunk or damaged roughly a dozen Russian warships since 2022 and forced the Black Sea Fleet to pull its main operations back to Novorossiysk, the U.S. Naval Institute reported in September.

Each boat costs a few hundred thousand dollars, below the price of a single modern torpedo.

The Pentagon is studying the lesson as it shifts focus toward a possible conflict with China.

The U.S. Navy expects to field thousands of small uncrewed surface vessels across the Indo-Pacific by 2030, Capt. Garrett Miller, who leads its Surface Development Group One, said at a Navy symposium on April 20, as reported by USNI News.

In a report last July, the Center for Strategic and International Studies urged the U.S. military to copy Kyiv’s acquisition methods, arguing that “unlike theoretical models or peacetime pilots, Ukraine’s innovations in defense acquisition are battlefield tested.”

And Ukraine has continued to innovate. Its Sub Sea Baby underwater drone struck an Improved Kilo-class submarine at its pier in Novorossiysk on Dec. 15, the first time an unmanned underwater vehicle has hit a submarine in port, the SBU said.

Russia denied any damage, but satellite imagery taken the following day showed a 9-meter crater in the pier, the submarine visibly lower in the water, and the vessel, later identified as the B-271 Kolpino, unmoved at its berth more than a month later. Ukrainian and independent analysts assessed it as a mission kill.

NATO is already training with Kyiv’s tactics, too.

Ukraine’s navy led a NATO red team and beat the alliance’s blue force in all five scenarios at the REPMUS naval-drone exercise in Portugal in September, the first time it had run the opposing force.

Russia’s interference reached Lithuania’s capital on May 20, when a drone forced Vilnius into shelters, shut its airport and cleared parliament, the first such alert in the city since 2022.

The jamming has been escalating for nearly three years, since Russia began disrupting signals around the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, and now spikes whenever Ukrainian drones fly toward Russian targets.

“This is the new reality of what the Baltic states face,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas said last week.

Romanian F-16s scrambled in response, President Nicușor Dan said.

Unlike the attacks that struck homes in Romania on Friday, most of the drones that have crossed into Baltic airspace over the last few months have not been launched by Russia, but instead have been operated by Ukraine and thrown off course by Russia.

Both strike drones launched at refineries and ports inside Russia and interceptor drones meant to take out incoming attacks have been steered off course and into NATO airspace by Russian spoofing several times over the last few years.

They have already done damage on allied soil: one struck a Latvian oil depot on May 7, exploding on impact. On May 19, a Romanian F-16 on NATO patrol shot another down over Estonia, the first time an allied jet had downed a drone believed to be Ukrainian.

From Kaliningrad, Russian transmitters broadcast counterfeit satellite signals strong enough to seize a drone’s navigation in flight, feed it false coordinates and send it off course.

Lithuania counted 36 of those spoofing transmitters this week, up from three at the start of 2025, reaching 450 kilometers (280 miles) across the region, according to Reuters.

NATO has condemned each strike and scrambled jets to meet them, but has not threatened any retaliation.

Romania’s foreign minister said the Galați strike could justify emergency consultations under NATO’s Article 4, the treaty’s mechanism for talks when a member’s security is threatened.

After speaking with Dan on Friday, Secretary-General Mark Rutte said the alliance stands ready to defend “every inch” of allied territory.

No member, though, has invoked Article 5, the clause that treats an attack on one ally as an attack on all.

Spoofing, meanwhile, is a form of electronic warfare that works by deception rather than brute force.

While jamming overwhelms a drone’s receiver with noise until it can no longer fix its position, spoofing instead sends a stronger, counterfeit signal that the receiver treats as genuine.

“The idea behind spoofing is to create deception,” Thomas Withington, an electronic-warfare specialist at the Royal United Services Institute, told PBS.

When a drone is fed a false fix, it can fly on a completely different path than its operator intended.

The drones most exposed are Ukraine’s long-range models, which fly north toward Russian oil-export terminals on the Gulf of Finland, including Ust-Luga and Primorsk near St. Petersburg.

Their routes hug the Baltic coast, where Russian electronic warfare is densest, and a drone that loses its true fix drifts into allied airspace, according to the Atlantic Council.

Drones crossed into Latvia “as a result of Russian electronic warfare systems,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said this month.

Ukraine’s own investigations, he said, “proved that this was the result of Russian electronic warfare deliberately diverting Ukrainian drones from their targets in Russia.”

Outside researchers have started to locate the transmitters.

A team from Gdynia Maritime University and the University of Colorado traced Baltic interference over the last year to two coastal sites in Kaliningrad, near the town of Okunevo and the naval base at Baltiysk, each beside known Russian electronic-warfare units.

“Interfering with GNSS signals is, unfortunately, very easy,” Ralf Ziebold of the German Aerospace Center told Defense News.

The network has only grown more entrenched.

“Now they have built up the infrastructure and the interference has become systemic, permanent,” Darius Kuliešius, deputy head of Lithuania’s communications regulator, told Reuters this week.

Ukraine has spent weeks insisting the strays are not its fault. Kyiv says it never routes attacks through allied airspace and has apologized to the Baltic states for drones it argues Russian jamming pushed off course.

Heorhii Tykhyi, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said as much after the Estonia shootdown on May 19.

“Moscow does this on purpose,” he said, apologizing to “Estonia and all our Baltic friends” and noting Ukraine’s only targets lie inside Russia.

Russia has denied steering the drones, casting the incursions instead as proof that the Baltics are abetting Ukrainian attacks.

To beat the spoofing, Ukraine is building drones that can fly without satellites at all.

Newer long-range models carry controlled-reception-pattern antennas that filter out spoofing signals, plus cameras and inertial backups that hold a course when the satellite link drops. Kyiv unveiled one, the Sichen, built to fly “under conditions of active electronic warfare,” in April, according to Militarnyi.

Countering wired drones that emit no signal at all is another challenge.

“Fiber-optic drones have shown us that drones insensitive to electronic warfare are a serious threat to logistics and personnel,” Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said last month.

Kyiv is racing to field more of them, even building a shared ground station to fly them at scale, he said, though the skyrocketing cost of fiber-optic cable limits how far they reach.

Officials from Kyiv and the Baltic states said they hope that increasing air defense coordination between countries in the region will help counter the threat, according to ERR.

Sybiha has offered to send Ukrainian experts to strengthen Baltic air defenses, and Kyiv and Vilnius agreed this week to build drones together and station Ukrainian specialists in Lithuania, according to Militarnyi.

The decision to fire on an intruding drone rests with national governments, not the alliance: NATO’s Baltic air-policing mission, run from a combined air operations center in Uedem, Germany, intercepts only on a member’s behalf, and each country sets its own rules of engagement.

Romania changed its law in 2024 to let its military shoot down intruding drones as a last resort, and its pilots were cleared to fire over Galați had they been able to do so without endangering civilians.

For the alliance’s frontline states, the working assumption is that the drones will keep coming.

“We need to adapt,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas said, “because the possibility of repeated similar scenarios is very high.”

The draft agreement would open a legal channel for Kyiv to sell its weapons to the U.S. for the first time since it effectively banned arms exports to maintain its own forces at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, CBS News first reported.

The memorandum, drawn between the State Department and Ukrainian Ambassador Olha Stefanishyna, would integrate Ukrainian producers into joint ventures and tech-transfer arrangements with American firms.

The development caps two weeks in which Kyiv adopted an export framework dubbed “Drone Deals,” launched a procurement coalition with multiple European partners and watched Washington lift a 1997 import ban – all while signing four bilateral export contracts and pursuing roughly 20 more across the Middle East and partner countries, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week.

Zelenskyy touted the new framework at a May 13 summit in Bucharest, Romania, with delegates from NATO’s nine eastern-flank members and their Nordic allies, as seen in a clip of the event posted on X.

“I believe all of us need bilateral Drone Deals,” he said, “using Europe’s production capabilities and Ukrainian expertise proven in real defense during a real war.”

Over four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has built an arms industry that manufactures much of the hardware seen on the battlefield today, but that has struggled to scale up while capped by export bans, funding limitations and manufacturing challenges caused by the ongoing war.

“The Ukrainian military will always have the right to priority and sufficient supply – they will take what is needed, and the volume beyond that will go to export,” Zelenskyy said in a April 28 Telegram post announcing the new policies.

After years of struggling to arm its one million active-duty soldiers, Kyiv has been wary of allowing its domestic producers to sell their weapons abroad at a markup in case they may choose profit over supplying their own military.

But times have changed. Foreign defense funding to Ukraine hit $6.1 billion in 2025, marking a tenfold increase over the roughly $600 million the year before, according to the Ministry of Defense, and the world is turning to Kyiv as the leader in modern warfare and defense tech.

Fears over remaining empty-handed at home appear to have subsided.

“In some production areas, we currently have up to 50% surplus capacity,” Zelenskyy said last month.

Ukraine’s defense production capacity has grown 35 times since the invasion began, from $1 billion to $35 billion, but domestic contracts covered only about a third of that last year – a gap Kyiv’s National Security and Defense Council projects will widen, with capacity expected to hit $55 billion in 2026.

Western contracts pay multiples of what the domestic procurement budget can offer, and those funds are the only capital large enough to fund the scale Ukraine needs to sustain both its front line and its surging arms industry.

Stefanishyna told the Philadelphia Inquirer in April that more than 100 U.S. investors have already expressed interest in Ukrainian defense-tech companies, and the U.S. government bought an initial 1,000 P1SUN drones from Ukraine that month.

Business lost?

Ukrainian producers have been pressing for new and improved export laws for years, but especially since demand from foreign buyers for Ukraine’s drones began surging after the war in the Middle East kicked off earlier this year.

Ihor Matviyuk has spent months turning down orders he cannot legally fill. He heads Aero Center Drones, a Kyiv-based manufacturer building FPV strike platforms and interceptor drones.

Until now, the only legal route has run through state arms-trade companies like Ukrspecexport, Progress and SpetsTechnoExport that take the contract on the producer’s behalf, he said.

“No Ukrainian company can export military goods independently. Companies can manufacture, but they cannot ship,” Matviyuk told Military Times in March.

He said a Western government asked Aero Center for 1,500 interceptor drones earlier this year, a request he’s now received several times over as the Iran war demonstrates how quickly a state can exhaust conventional interceptor stocks defending against mass-drone attacks.

But Matviyuk said he had to turn down the request despite having the manufacturing capacity to do it within weeks without affecting his current contracts.

“We cannot currently export large quantities,” he said at the time. “It’s only possible at the state level.”

The new framework permits five export categories – drones, missiles, ammunition, software and integration services – drawn from Defense Ministry-certified surplus. The Foreign Ministry and intelligence services have naturally blacklisted Russia and its cooperators from buying Ukrainian.

“The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, based on intergovernmental agreements with partners, will define the framework for cooperation – just to ensure that Ukrainian technologies and Ukrainian weapons do not end up in Russian hands,” Zelenskyy said.

It opens three legal channels for producers – independent licensing through the State Export Control Service, routing via specialized state arms-trade companies, and a 15-day “Defense City” preliminary permit that skips Cabinet designation, though the interagency commission still reviews every application under all three routes.

Defense City is a special legal regime for defense manufacturers, launched in January, that grants qualifying firms tax exemptions, simplified customs and the fast-track 15-day export permit regardless of where they operate in Ukraine. Approved firms will also be able to sell through the ten European hubs Zelenskyy announced in February, according to Euronews.

Every signed contract will now move through a 90-day clock at the State Export Control Service and a 17-member interagency commission under the National Security and Defense Council, replacing a licensing regime that set no fixed timelines and left approvals to bureaucratic discretion.

The NSDC commission had sat dormant for eight months until Zelenskyy reactivated it in December. It has made roughly 80 decisions since then, according to Ukrinform.

The new framework is intended to break the bottleneck that turned Matviyuk’s prospective 1,500-interceptor order into a loss, and Zelenskyy said the new timelines should close the room for graft that the old system created.

“We also need automatic export authorizations with a clear and predictable timeframe for approval, so that there is no ground for corruption,” he said.

Kyiv officials have pledged to continue advancing anti-corruption enforcement in parallel – a difficult process that has seen several successes but still has significant work ahead, according to a 2026 analysis by the global watchdog group Transparency International.

Procurement orchestrations

For Kyiv, things are moving forward elsewhere, too, when it comes to fresh approaches to defense purchases with European partners.

Ukraine and five European nations – Finland, Italy, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom – signed the CORPUS Memorandum on April 30 in a Kyiv hotel garage-turned-bunker, launching a defense-procurement coalition that links the countries’ national procurement agencies to coordinate buying, share supply-chain intelligence and open a path to joint contracts.

Ukraine’s CORPUS chair, Arsen Zhumadilov, also heads the country’s Defense Procurement Agency, set up in 2023 to take over arms buying after scandals over inflated food contracts and substandard winter jackets cost then-Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov his job.

One of the DPA’s biggest moves against corruption and approval delays cut out the intermediaries – middleman firms that had been a required layer between state buyers and private manufacturers. Their share of arms procurement has fallen from 81% to 12%.

Zhumadilov’s role in CORPUS places Ukraine’s own procurement agency inside a multinational coalition, rather than leaving it only on the buyer’s side.

“We are starting with the exchange of experience and best practices to build coordination mechanisms, mutual trust, and plan for the future,” Zhumadilov said at the CORPUS post-signing press conference.

Denmark, France and the Netherlands have already registered interest in joining the group, he added.

More bilateral defense procurement partnerships are in the works, too. Kyiv and Berlin announced six new joint ventures over the last month, and Norway inked a parallel cooperation declaration to mass-produce Ukraine’s mid-range strike drones. Zelenskyy has announced plans to open ten export hubs across Europe in 2026, with production lines already running in the United Kingdom.

European leaders increasingly see Ukrainian weapons production as key to allied defense.

“Instead of us thinking that Ukraine needs Europe, perhaps we should think that we in Europe need Ukraine more,” Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, said on May 4.

The pilot purchase, made without competitive bidding, follows earlier Merops deployments and training with Polish and Romanian forces along NATO’s eastern flank.

The system is an example of a new crop of drone countermeasures marketed under an ultra-low-cost mantra that promises to even out a longstanding imbalance in air defense: Intercepting aerial threats like drones is exponentially more expensive than launching them.

It’s a brave new world for arms vendors, especially in the West, nursed on lavish defense budgets over decades. A price point advantage is no longer measured in millions of dollars below the competition, but in mere thousands.

Merops is “capable of intercepting Shahed, Gerbera, and other similar targets,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas said, according to national broadcaster LRT – a claim the manufacturer, Perennial Autonomy, confirmed to Military Times, saying Merops has already successfully engaged both target types in combat.

The American-made system saw its first official combat confirmation last month, when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told Congress that Merops had been used to down Iranian Shaheds aimed at U.S. troops in the Middle East.

The Army bought 13,000 Merops interceptors in eight days after Iran began launching drones at U.S. positions in late February, Driscoll said in April 16 testimony.

The Pentagon turned to Merops after burning through hundreds of Patriot missiles defending against Iranian Shaheds – each Patriot costing more than $3 million, drawing down stockpiles Ukraine has long depended on for its own air defense.

“They protected U.S. troops,” Driscoll told lawmakers, defending the $15,000 unit cost as a fraction of what a Shahed costs to produce. “We will make that trade all day long.”

Merops is built by Perennial Autonomy, the secretive defense startup former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt launched in 2023 as White Stork, according to Forbes.

The company rebranded to Project Eagle in February 2024, and again to Perennial Autonomy, and pulled in former Pentagon innovation chief Will Roper alongside engineers from Apple, SpaceX and Google.

Merops’s closest peers are Ukrainian drones – which are cheaper, have been in combat longer, and are already winning NATO buyers of their own.

Schmidt set out to build attack drones, but was soon convinced by his Ukrainian hosts that defensive interceptor drones – built to take out incoming drones mid-air, minimizing ground damage – were the best investment. Ukrainian forces first deployed Merops as a Shahed interceptor in June 2024, and Poland and Romania have since fielded it along NATO’s eastern flank.

Ukrainian air defense, which averaged roughly 90% interception rates of incoming Russian drones and 80% of cruise missiles in March, has taken the spotlight worldwide as Iranian Shaheds and other unmanned air and ground vessels have caused hundreds of American casualties and billions in damage to US military assets since the war in the Middle East kicked off over two months ago.

Typical Ukrainian-built interceptors run $1,000 to $3,000 a unit and have downed thousands of Russian Shaheds since 2024, with kills logged through Ukraine’s Mission Control battlefield system.

Merops has logged more than 1,000 Shahed-type intercepts in Ukraine since combat testing began in mid-2024, Militarnyi reported. The Pentagon has yet to disclose a Middle East engagement count or per-target success rate.

No interceptor system holds a clear edge, said Stanislav Gryshyn, co-founder of Ukrainian interceptor maker General Cherry.

Their drones ranked first among Ukrainian producers in enemy kills in March, with units logging 11,473 confirmed hits – 5,800 more than the previous month – the highest absolute growth in effectiveness of any tracked system in the period, according to Militarnyi.

The company’s jet-powered Bullet interceptor recorded 3,296 visually confirmed kills in February alone, verified through Ukraine’s Delta battle-management system, Gryshyn told Military Times.

“Anyone claiming one product is better in all respects is either lying or misunderstanding the market,” Gryshyn said.

Four Ukrainian-built interceptors dominate the Shahed-killing fleet: SkyFall’s P1-SUN, Wild Hornets’ Sting, the Ukrainian-British Octopus, and General Cherry’s Bullet.

The Army has deployed roughly 20 Merops complexes to one Middle East site staffed by more than 100 soldiers, about 10 complexes to a second site, and 1,000 armed and unarmed interceptors across the two locations, according to Business Insider. The Surveyor interceptor is flown with an Xbox controller, the publication reported.

Perennial Autonomy also makes the Bumblebee V2, a multirotor FPV interceptor already deployed in Ukraine, on a separate $5.2 million Pentagon contract, according to Calibre Defence.

Bullet works differently. The jet-powered interceptor tops 300 kilometers per hour, climbs to 6,000 meters, and runs on a four-person crew – driver, operator, navigator, communications – Gryshyn told Military Times.

“The guidance system predicts the target and reacts at high speed,” Gryshyn said. “The operator confirms via FPV goggles, and the system completes the intercept.”

Production is the bottleneck. Ukraine has scaled interceptor manufacturing through three parallel channels, with output in the first four months of 2026 already surpassing all of 2025, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said April 27.

“Our task is to ensure a stable supply of interceptors to the military and to protect Ukrainians from Shahed attacks,” Fedorov said.

General Cherry can currently scale to 100,000 drones a month and is still expanding its manufacturing capabilities, Gryshyn told Military Times.

The company signed production deals in March and April with New Hampshire-based Wilcox Industries and Croatia’s Orqa, seeding distributed NATO production lines.

The Pentagon has committed more than $600 million to counter-drone procurement since the Iran war opened, including $350 million for CENTCOM in the first 30 days, DefenseScoop reported.

Drone spending will run “conservatively, $54 billion” in fiscal 2027 – “closer to $74 billion” once counter-drone programs are added, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday in his first congressional appearance since the Iran war began.

Competition for those dollars is fierce – and Ukrainian manufacturers are already strong players.

SkyFall’s Shrike 10 Fiber, submitted through U.K. partner Skycutter, took first place in the opening round of the Pentagon’s $1.1 billion Drone Dominance program – a four-round competition of strike drones between 25 companies at Fort Benning, Georgia, aiming to field more than 300,000 low-cost drones for U.S. forces – with two of the top six finishers Ukrainian-designed.

No equivalent open competition exists for interceptor drones like Bullet. Merops side-stepped the traditionally slow procurement process by getting fast-tracked through the Army’s G-TEAD program, which aims to provide troops with “combat‑credible capabilities at the speed of war,” the U.S. Army said last month.

Now, Merops has been flagged as a transition candidate for a program of record under Project Manager Close Combat Systems, the step from prototype to sustained acquisition.

Even at scale, the Pentagon’s floor is Ukraine’s ceiling.

Merops could drop to $10,000 a piece at scale, Driscoll said. Ukrainian-built interceptors are already well below that price point.

The directive from Kyiv, Fedorov said in an April Telegram post, is to defeat Russia by “degrading its economic capacity” – and price asymmetry is the lever. Russia launched a record 6,663 drones at Ukraine in April, averaging 222 a night, according to the air force.

A defense engineered for that volume cannot run on $15,000 systems, a lesson Ukraine has learned and is now beginning to sell abroad.

“When you need to shoot down 60 Shaheds at once, you need $2,000 systems, not $15,000 complexes,” Gryshyn told Military Times.

Ukraine asked the Pentagon last August to help scale interceptor manufacturing. Washington declined.

Kyiv is opening the market on its own.

Zelenskyy unveiled an arms-export framework April 27, citing up to 50% surplus capacity in parts of the defense industry and naming the Middle East and Persian Gulf, Europe and the Caucasus as target markets. Ukrainian forces get first claim on production; surplus goes abroad.

“The export of Ukrainian weapons will become a reality,” Zelenskyy said last week.

The Ground Truth Symposium will be hosted on March 25 by the Peace Through Strength Institute, a foreign policy and defense think tank based in Washington.

The event promises to translate “Ukraine’s frontline reality into clearer congressional understanding of the war, the capabilities shaping it and the conditions required to help bring it to an end on terms consistent with both Ukraine’s survival and United States strategic interests,” according to a release.

Representatives from several Ukrainian drone units will participate in the symposium, including soldiers from the country’s most effective UAV squads like Lazar Group, the 12th Special Forces Brigade and the 414th UAV Brigade “Magyar’s Birds.”

Discussions are expected to focus on Ukraine’s expertise in drone tactics and technology, along with the best practices for integrating the newer class of weapons into countries’ existing air defense systems.

The heavy use of several types of drones by multiple countries since the start of the recent conflict in the Middle East, currently involving about a dozen countries, will be a major talking point.

“Ukraine’s experience offers critical lessons for the United States and its allies — lessons the United States and our allies need now in the Iranian conflict,” the event’s press release stated.

Ukraine first made the shift to cheap interceptors not by choice, but because Russia’s nightly Shahed waves were burning through Western-provided missiles faster than allies could resupply them.

Last month, Ukrainian interceptors destroyed more than 70% of incoming Shaheds over Kyiv, freeing scarce Patriot missiles for the ballistic threats they were designed to stop.

Interceptor drones are small, fast, semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft — often costing between $1,000 and $2,500 each — designed to hunt and destroy incoming drones by ramming into them or detonating alongside them at altitude.

Compact enough to fit inside a duffel bag and fast enough to chase a Shahed in the dark, Ukraine’s interceptors can fly at speeds between 195 and 280 miles per hour, depending on the model.

Most combine thermal imaging with radar tracking and AI-assisted guidance, with a human operator taking manual control for the final seconds of the intercept.

“You don’t have time,” Andrii Hrytseniuk, the CEO of Brave1, recalled telling officials in recent years. “Shahed [drones] will come not only to Ukraine, but to other countries. You need to use your time not to stick to previous conventional warfare, but to work on the new era.”

Brave1 was established in 2023 as Ukraine’s state-backed defense innovation hub, which funds, tests, and fast-tracks new military technology from hundreds of Ukrainian startups.

Three years after Brave1’s formation, the Iran war has made Hrytseniuk’s warning prescient.

In the first week alone, the U.S. and Israel struck more than 3,000 targets across Iran while Tehran fired over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones at U.S. bases and Israeli cities across 12 countries, burning through over 800 Patriot interceptor missiles in three days — more than Ukraine received from allies throughout four years of war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pointed out on Thursday.

“And we are not slowing down,” U.S. Central Command posted on X the next day.

The conflict has since drawn in at least a dozen countries and put Ukraine’s counter-drone expertise at the center of a global scramble, with the Pentagon and at least one Gulf state now in active talks to buy Ukrainian-made interceptor drones, according to Financial Times. An EU envoy, meanwhile, is reportedly brokering introductions between Gulf governments and Kyiv’s manufacturers.

“They are really asking for some help with interceptor drones specifically,” Hrytseniuk told Military Times on Friday.

Ukraine first made the shift to cheap interceptors not by choice, but because Russia’s nightly Shahed waves were burning through Western-provided missiles faster than allies could resupply them.

Last month, Ukrainian interceptors destroyed more than 70% of incoming Shaheds over Kyiv, freeing scarce Patriot missiles for the ballistic threats they were designed to stop.

The irony is hard to ignore: the besieged country that spent four years begging for Patriot batteries to combat a nuclear power 10 times its size has quietly built a new layer of air defense at a fraction of the cost, according to The New York Times — and now Washington, which spent roughly $4 billion on missile defense interceptors in the first week of the Iran war alone, is calling Kyiv for help.

Interceptor drones are small, fast, semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft — often costing between $1,000 and $2,500 each — designed to hunt and destroy incoming drones by ramming into them or detonating alongside them at altitude.

Compact enough to fit inside a duffel bag and fast enough to chase a Shahed in the dark, Ukraine’s interceptors can fly at speeds between 195 and 280 miles per hour, depending on the model.

Most combine thermal imaging with radar tracking and AI-assisted guidance, with a human operator taking manual control for the final seconds of the intercept.

Ukraine now has more than 20 companies producing interceptor drones, the National Security and Defense Council announced in January.

“The most impressive thing is how far we have technically advanced,” Roman Yeremenko, a director at Aero Center, a Ukrainian full-cycle manufacturer that builds both drones and their ammunition, told Military Times earlier this week.

Modern Ukrainian interceptors started with Mavic scouts dropping jerry-rigged grenades — simple, improvised.

Then came FPV drones: first 7-inch frames, then 10, then 12. Aero Center’s first munition, Malyuk (“Baby”), weighed just 450 grams — enough for one or two Mavic drops.

“But the troops kept asking for more capabilities,” Yeremenko said.

Then came “1 kg payloads, 1.5 kg, even bigger,” he said.

Engineers working long into the night learned to wire warheads directly to flight controllers, built initiation systems and moved into producing kamikaze FPVs.

What’s getting developed now? Heavy bombers carry 5–10 kg of ammunition and fly 25–35 miles regularly, according to Yeremenko.

“This is a war of technology,” he said. “And the one who is ahead will win this war.”

Several Ukrainian companies are now fielding systems with combat records no Western manufacturer can match.

Wild Hornets‘ Sting has been in combat longer than any other Ukrainian interceptor.

A spokesman for the group told CBS News last week that the $2,500 FPV drone has downed 3,900 drones since May 2025 — including, the company says, the first confirmed downing of Russia’s jet-powered Geran-3 and a Shahed fitted with an air-to-air missile.

Reaching 195 mph with a thermal camera and AI-assisted terminal guidance, it can engage targets up to 15 miles away and fits in a standard duffel bag.

At the lowest price point is SkyFall’s P1-SUN, a fiber-optic Shahed hunter on a 3D-printed modular airframe that costs Ukrainian units just $1,000 a pop.

A company representative recently told Reuters that the drone, which SkyFall says has been upgraded to 280-mph capabilities with computer vision and thermal imaging, has downed more than 1,500 Shaheds and 1,000 other drones in four months — and is a hot ticket item internationally since Iran came under fire.

Then there is Ukrspecsystems‘ Octopus, now built under license by more than 15 Ukrainian manufacturers and, since November, at a new factory in the United Kingdom.

It flies at night, cuts through electronic jamming at up to 4,500 meters, and locks onto targets autonomously — the kind of all-conditions reliability that made it the MoD’s pick for mass production.

The UK deal marked the first time a Western government licensed a Ukrainian-designed interceptor for domestic production, a model that five NATO countries — Germany, France, Italy, Poland and the UK — have since agreed to build on by jointly developing affordable interceptor drones of their own, per Militarnyi.

Not every system follows the same blueprint. Aero Center is teaming up with Dwarf Engineering, a software company focused on creating multiplatform mission control systems for UAVs, to build a comprehensive interceptor drone package for Ukrainian units and international partners that includes the drone, payload and software needed to integrate it into current air defense systems.

It’s a different approach to development entirely, Ihor Matviyuk, who heads Aero Center Drones, Aero Center’s subsidiary UAV division, told Military Times.

“An extra 100 grams [on a combat drone] can mean minus two kilometers range,” Vladyslav Piotrovskyi, Dwarf Engineering’s CEO, told Military Times on Friday.

Piotrovskyi added that the trade-off only works if all three components are optimized as one.

But every groundbreaking interceptor system in Ukraine’s arsenal faces the same expiration window.

Russia’s latest strike drone, the feared Geran-5, can reach speeds up to 370 mph — technically fast enough to outrun every Ukrainian interceptor currently in service, according to Business Insider — and they grow deadlier every day.

“The Russians are trying. They are not as stupid as they look,” Yeremenko told Military Times. “They are adapting to our means of destruction.”

Ukrainian and Russian tech becomes outdated every six weeks on average, the drone experts explained, so Ukraine cannot stand still.

Aero Center is now building medium-class drones with payloads up to 10 kilograms and ranges of roughly 25 kilometers — “middle-sized drones, but with the functions and features of big bombers” — designed for a battlefield where the threat evolves faster than any single airframe can answer, the company’s UAV expert said.

Ukraine has already learned how to build and integrate an entirely new air defense system in an asymmetric war. Now, it’s offering the playbook to allies — in exchange for the kind of help Kyiv still cannot produce on its own.

“We are ready to help. We are suggesting help,” Brave1’s CEO told Military Times. “For us, it’s important to have an alliance that is strong — to stop the war and prevent the start of new wars.”

Alongside an image of a burning Shahed posted Friday on X, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense spelled out its current offer to the West:

“We can help you fight against Shaheds. Help us fight against ballistic missiles.”

Over the capital, the new class of interceptors is even more effective. Drones were credited with more than 70% of Shahed downings in February, Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi announced on Tuesday.

The math tells the story: A single Patriot interceptor costs over $3 million, a NASAMS round slightly over $1 million — and each Shahed costs Russia as little as $35,000 to manufacture, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That puts Ukraine on the wrong side of an approximately 85-to-1 cost exchange every time it uses a Patriot to defend against a drone.

But at $3,000 to $5,000 apiece and an average success rate over 60%, interceptors are now changing the calculus of war, Zelenskyy told Fox News late last year.

These drones, a weapons category that barely existed a few years ago, have become the fastest-growing layer of Ukraine’s air defense.

“We are the first in the world to have a system of destroying drones with drones in the air,” Col. Yuriy Cherevashenko, deputy commander of UAVs for air defense of the Ukrainian Air Force, said in a video marking the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Facing an unrelenting adversary whose economy dwarfs its own by nearly tenfold, Ukraine had no choice but to outthink rather than outspend, and interceptor drones — mobile, cheap and scalable enough to answer Russian mass production with Ukrainian ingenuity — have emerged as their biggest bet.

Now, what began as battlefield improvisation has become a deliberate war strategy.

“Drones now occupy a wide segment of the air defense system,” Cherevashenko said. “In the future, they will be perhaps the most numerous means of destroying aerial targets.”

Their rapid development over the last year tracked Russia’s escalating use of Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones, which by mid-2025 were arriving in record-breaking waves that overwhelmed Ukraine’s missile-based air defenses faster than Western allies could resupply them.

“We needed to supply a lot of interceptors this year, because without them, the winter would have been even harder for Ukraine,” Alona Zhuzha, director of digitalization at Ukraine’s newly established Defense Procurement Agency, told Military Times.

The National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) said the country produced 100,000 interceptor drones in 2025 and reported that production capacity has grown eightfold compared to the prior period.

Frontline units received an average of over 1,500 interceptor drones per day in December and January — up from about 1,000 per day during the previous period, the MOD said at the beginning of the year.

That supply is translating into operational tempo: Last month, interceptor drones flew approximately 6,300 sorties and destroyed more than 1,500 Russian UAVs of various types, Syrskyi said.

Interceptors are now a top priority on the DOT-Chain Defence marketplace, the digital platform through which units order directly from manufacturers.

“They are very critical for our defense,” Zhuzha said.

Russian tech continues to evolve, too.

Moscow’s drones have been equipped with rear-facing infrared spotlights designed to blind interceptor pilots, and some have been armed with air-to-air missiles to shoot back, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, a radio expert and early advocate of interceptor tech who was recently appointed as an adviser to the Ministry of Defence, wrote on Telegram in January.

Russia has also expanded its use of decoy drones — foam-and-plywood models including the Gerbera and Parody — which now constitute roughly one-third of all Russian mass attacks, specifically designed to exhaust interceptors and overload the detection layer, according to Defence-UA.

Ukraine now flies several distinct classes of interceptors: cheap FPV airframes built for last-kilometer kills — the kind that catch a Shahed before it reaches a substation or apartment block — and faster pursuit systems tied to forward drone lines, designed to launch immediately upon detection, climb fast, and intercept before the threat crosses into civilian airspace, according to the NSDC.

Higher-speed interceptors designed for targets like the jet-powered Geran-3 variants, where the old FPV chase math breaks, are emerging now too, according to Ukrainska Pravda.

And networked defense systems are beginning to link interceptor nodes across sectors, sharing tracks so a single incoming target can be handed off from one crew to the next as it crosses boundaries.

One unit trying to push forward the development and use of interceptors is Lazar’s Group — a drone formation within the National Guard’s 27th Pechersk Brigade known as one of the most effective interceptor units in the country.

Phoenix, who commands the group’s drone operations, told Military Times that the group has destroyed more than $15 billion in Russian military equipment since the full-scale invasion — part of Ukraine’s broader shift away from infantry warfare. Military Times agreed to refer to all active duty soldiers by their nom de guerre for operational security.

Strike drones, not interceptors — still account for “60 to 70% of confirmed hits” on Russian equipment and personnel across the battle zone. “Interceptors take out most of the rest.”

Lazar’s Group utilizes both. Fixed-wing strike models can engage deep targets and conduct reconnaissance well beyond the battle’s edge, while interceptors are optimized for counter-UAV work at shorter ranges and higher closing speeds.

For example: Ukraine’s Wild Hornets “Sting” interceptor — a quad-rotor designed to chase and collide with enemy drones — is reported to reach speeds over 300 km/h and operate out to roughly 25 kilometers in interception missions, with altitude service up to several thousand feet, while fixed-wing interceptor variants such as the VB140 Flamingo are designed with extended pursuit profiles that can engage reconnaissance drones at ranges up to 50 km.

The real challenge slowing interceptor innovation now? Sensors.

“We just need better radar,” Phoenix said. “It allows you to see your enemy and your plane. You understand where you are and where your enemy is, and you can fly to that position.”

Ukraine’s most common intercepts still start with cueing: radar tracks, acoustic spotters and stitched feeds from Ukraine’s master “Mission Control” battlefield management system that put a pilot in the right place at the right time.

“Without good radar — durable sensors, strong [electronic warfare] defense, etc. — it’s very difficult,” he told Military Times.

To counter Russian electronic warfare, another persistent problem, the unit builds its own interceptor drones with proprietary remote control and video transmitter systems designed to resist jamming.

“We create our own models because we understand the technical specifications that we need,” Phoenix said. “So they’re not immediately jammed or located.”

Illustrating the problem, SpaceX cut off Russian forces’ contraband Starlink terminals at Ukraine’s request last month — but the disruption also knocked out feeds for Ukrainian units sharing the same network, leaving parts of the front without connectivity or intercept capability, according to CNN.

Artificial intelligence has not yet come to dominate interception missions — today it is still manual ramming or close-in detonation.

“Our pilots mostly operate manually,” Phoenix told Military Times. “Because AI features are nice, but sometimes they just aren’t working.”

Finding solutions to the other common hurdles beyond radar — like battery endurance in freezing conditions or operator fatigue on overnight shifts — tends to be simpler, Phoenix said.

“After that, they just keep flying.”

Lazar’s Group’s strategy has become a national model for how to institutionalize a new layer of air defense into the existing military structure, both in Ukraine and abroad.

The 1,700-strong group is helping construct the country’s Drone Line — an unmanned kill zone stretching 15-kilometers deep across the front, announced by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense a year ago.

In Brussels, officials have been pushing their own version of a drone wall to bolster defenses along Europe’s eastern flank, but the effort has run into political and technical hurdles, according to Reuters.

Kyiv has taken note, and begun leveraging its country’s battlefield tech, skills and data as a major benefit of remaining its staunch ally as peace trilateral negotiations to end the war continue between Ukraine, Russia and the United States.

“As we work together to protect lives in Ukraine, we are building a new system – a new security and response architecture, new approaches – to protect lives in any European country when needed,” Zelenskyy told his counterparts at the Munich Security Conference in February.

“Our wall of drones is your wall of drones.”

Outmanned and outgunned by a nuclear power in the largest land war in Europe since 1945, Ukraine’s front line is increasingly held not by soldiers, but by machines and the skeleton crews that control them.

Commanders describe brigades hollowed out to half strength or worse. Frontline units often operate at 50% to 60% of authorized manning, some as low as 30%.

In some sectors, a maximum of 12 fighters hold 5 to 10 kilometers of front, far below what Cold War-era NATO planning assumed for high-intensity defense.

The numbers tell the story of an army running out of people. The average frontline soldier is 43 to 45 years old, according to Bloomberg.

Roughly 200,000 troops are absent without leave, and around 2 million men are evading mobilization, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told CNN in January, with Western and Ukrainian analysts estimating the overall shortfall at 300,000 personnel.

Ukraine is no longer just supplementing its infantry with tech — it is replacing infantry in many cases with drones, ground robots, sensor networks, minefields and artillery cued by unmanned systems.

The battlefield revolution was not born simply of necessity, but as a war strategy of a smaller nation against a much larger enemy.

In the Donetsk region alone, Russian losses reach 156 soldiers per square kilometer, Fedorov said in an address marking the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion.

Ukraine’s benchmark: more than 200 casualties per square kilometer — “a level of losses at which further advance becomes impossible,” Federov told reporters on Monday.

Over the past year, Military Times interviewed dozens of drone operators, robotics engineers and defense officials across Ukraine to understand how the country is bridging its manpower shortage — and what an increasingly unmanned army looks like.

As a correspondent who has covered this war since the first hours of the full-scale invasion, I have never seen the battlefield transform this rapidly.

Inside Lazar’s Group, a National Guard special forces formation that has claimed more than 40,000 targets destroyed since the full-scale invasion, the substitution is already operational architecture.

The roughly 1,700-person drone unit, according to its commanders, stations a ground crew every 10 kilometers along the front, an ISR team every 20, with FPV pilots and interceptor crews filling the gaps.

Commanders say its strike drones now account for 60% to 70% of all hits in its sector.

In practice, that means a single operator hunched over a tablet in a basement can toggle between three FPV feeds while sending one drone into a trench line as two more orbit overhead waiting for targets — one pilot doing the work of a squad.

“More drones, more Russians killed,” “Phoenix,” the operational head of Lazar’s Group, told Military Times at the Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum in February.

Military Times agreed to refer to all active duty soldiers by their nom de guerre for operational security.

Russia does not face the same constraint — and is not pushed to innovate as quickly or dramatically as a result.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last year that Moscow was recruiting 40,000 to 45,000 troops per month, compared to Ukraine’s 25,000 to 27,000.

Ukrainian military intelligence data suggests the actual pace is around 30,000 to 35,000 new Russian contract soldiers per month, according to the Kyiv Independent — still enough to outpace Ukraine’s intake by a widening margin.

Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Col. Yuriy Myronenko, a former infantry officer and combat drone unit commander who now helps oversee Ukraine’s unmanned systems strategy, told Military Times, “This is the only chance to win for us. There is no other chance.”

So, the military is adapting.

The 28th Brigade’s newly formed Unmanned Systems Battalion “Flash” is Ukraine’s first international UAV unit — a foreign-heavy drone force where English fluency, not combat experience, is the entry requirement.

“Infantry is dead,” “Scooby,” a Polish Flash operator who had just returned from his first mission with Flash, told Military Times earlier this month.

The 28th Brigade has already shifted 70% of frontline logistics to robotic systems, its commanders told Military Times.

Designed as a replicable model for how Ukraine wants to restructure force composition, the unit runs FPV strikes, drone-on-drone air defense and ground robot operations. The substitution is happening in layers.

His description matches what drone operators across multiple units described to Military Times: units are exponentially increasing their kill rates by investing a majority of their strategic resources on autonomous and unmanned tech.

According to internal Ukrainian estimates and government data published by Reuters, drones accounted for 69% of strikes on Russian troops and 75% on vehicles and equipment in 2024.

By the end of 2025, drones were responsible for more than 80% of all enemy targets destroyed, with 819,737 video-confirmed hits logged that year.

Twelve drone operators with enough airframes can now do the work of dozens of infantry — a ratio that inverts the traditional calculus of ground combat.

In the 12th Azov Brigade’s sector, commander “Kil” has described areas where there is “absolutely no Ukrainian infantry” — defense maintained largely through UAV surveillance, artillery strikes and minefields, according to NV.

Drones spot targets, artillery fires on them, mines block movement — and infantry enters only for specific tasks.

“Our battalion is an unmanned systems battalion,” Ash, head of Flash’s medical and MPZ — the unit’s morale and psychological support program — told Military Times. “It means we don’t have infantry.”

After four years of mixed battlefield tactics blending muddy trench warfare with kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has already become the drone war of the future — fought almost autonomously from a distance, strength, brute strength and numbers matter less than robotic force multipliers and electronic warfare.

“We do drones. We kill with drones. We save with drones. We liberate with drones.”

Integrating unmanned systems into the core of its military fabric is no longer improvisation in Ukraine. It is doctrine.

After taking office in January, Fedorov outlined a government plan built around what he called “the mathematics of war” — from completing corps-level reform to transforming command systems through data-driven management.

Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, a standalone military branch established in 2024 and now commanded by Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, encompasses more than a dozen strike and reconnaissance units, including the 414th “Magyar’s Birds” Brigade, the top performer on the military’s verified combat-rating leaderboard.

These USF units have destroyed thousands of enemy targets each week in February, according to Ukrainian Defense Ministry data.

Brovdi’s philosophy for the force: “People think — machines do the work.”

The Ukrainian military has separately set the goal of establishing a 15-kilometer unmanned “kill zone” along the front lines, a project dubbed the Drone Line.

And the supply chain is catching up to the doctrine.

Alona Zhuzha, director of digitalization at Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency, told Military Times that drone delivery times have dropped from two to three months to an average of 10 days — and in some cases, one day from order to frontline delivery.

But the ambitious model still faces challenges.

A historic winter has hammered battery-powered drones. Temperatures across the 1,200-kilometer front line plunged to their lowest of the entire four-year war — hitting minus 20 Celsius — with cameras icing over, batteries dying mid-flight and short-circuits grounding entire fleets, AFP reported.

Troops have resorted to unorthodox solutions for airframe insulation.

“We just put lard on them, and it takes off. I’m laughing, but it’s how it is,” Denys Shtilierman, chief constructor at Fire Point, a company making Ukraine’s first long-range drones, told AFP.

Russia is adapting in parallel, scaling its own FPV production and using heavy electronic warfare to jam and burn down Ukrainian drone swarms.

Robots are still a long way from warring autonomously.

“There’s no such thing as replacing infantry,” Jesse Nuese, a former U.S. Army paratrooper and Afghanistan veteran who co-founded Forward Horizon Group to facilitate reconstruction and technology transfer between the U.S. and Ukraine, told Military Times in Kyiv. “Unmanned systems cannot hold ground alone.”

He may be right — for now.

But on a stretch of front east of Pokrovsk, a tracked robot with a 12.7mm machine gun holds a position for weeks without a crew — and somewhere behind it, a single operator toggles between three feeds, doing the work of a squad.

And battlefield dynamics continue to evolve at lightning speed.

“One pilot, three drones now,” Phoenix said. “It would already be 10 with more funding.”

The new system sits inside DELTA, Ukraine’s battlefield management ecosystem — an operational platform that already connects sensors and shooters across air, land, maritime, cyber, and space domains.

Ukrainian drone crews enter operational data into the system, including drone type, launch location, flight route, and mission task, which generates reports on real battlefield activity, according to officials. The process is meant to eliminate paper reports, facilitating an immediate analysis of battlefield conditions and strike effectiveness.

Mission Control represents Kyiv’s latest push to turn improvised war-fighting into a standardized, data-driven operation, echoing the sensor-to-shooter integration Western militaries have sought for decades.

The rollout comes as Ukraine positions its wartime data trove as leverage in peace negotiations — and as a touchpoint for deeper integration with allies.

“We will create a system that allows them to develop their software solutions utilizing our data,” Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told reporters days before launching Mission Control, per Reuters. “Currently, data from the front lines holds immense value.”

Although Fedorov announced the system’s kickoff just last month, officials have been working on the concept for years as a means to level the playing field against Russia’s military numerical overmatch, Ukraine, Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Col. Yuriy Myronenko told Military Times last week.

“We are a very different country from our enemy,” Myronenko said. “They have a lot of resources, people, money, and a lot of Soviet units, storage, ammunition, and a lot of things.”

Myronenko served as a combat commander fighting with drones in Ukraine’s southern front in 2023, then led the DELTA development group, then oversaw national cyber defense and drone procurement before moving to his current post.

His view, and his recent appointment as deputy minister after serving previously in the Ministry of Digital Transformation alongside Federov, reflects the ministry’s broader bet that technology and speed are the country’s top assets for offsetting Russia’s advantages in manpower and materiel.

“We have good software, and we like technology, we like markets,” he said. “This is the only chance to win for us. There is no other chance.”

Ukraine now produces or procures more than 5 million drones annually, Myronenko confirmed to Military Times, including both “kamikaze, one-time-use drones” and fixed-wing drones reaching beyond 1,000 kilometers.

Mission Control is designed to manage this arsenal across a front line stretching hundreds of kilometers.

The advantage, Myronenko said, is not the technology itself — it’s how fast Ukraine can identify what works and scale it before the enemy adapts. “If we receive technology, the enemy will receive it as well,” he said. “Speed is key.”

Mission Control feeds directly into Ukraine’s performance-based “gamification” model, where drone units earn points for verified kills and top performers get priority access to new equipment. The connection is automatic: data entered into Mission Control flows into the ePoints ranking system without requiring separate reporting, Myronenko said.

“It is important for us to have a complete picture — with results and accumulated experience.”

Mission Control is designed to give commanders real-time visibility into what’s working and what’s not.

“Some units use drones very efficiently, some of them don’t, some of them have good management, some of them don’t,” Myronenko said. “We need to understand what is happening on the battlefield.”

The centralized system resolves that problem: “Commanders can see the whole picture. They can see what is working. They can see what is not working. They can see which crews are effective. They can see which drones are effective. They can see which tactics are effective,” he said. “And after that, they can scale it.”

The initiative also captures failure data for the first time. Before Mission Control, Ukraine could track confirmed kills, but not misses.

“We received all kinds of information about successful killing, but we didn’t have information about failures,” Myronenko said.

That means commanders can now calculate actual effectiveness rates, cost-per-kill, and identify underperforming systems — not just count hits.

“We are moving from chaos and fragmented data to managed, technological warfare, where decisions are made based on precise figures, not assumptions,” Fedorov said at the system’s launch. “This is the new logic of war.”

Myronenko — who previously led Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communication, the agency responsible for national cyber defense — said officials are creating the system with the highest levels of cybersecurity protection available, including those upheld by NATO partners.

“The security system itself is checked constantly,” Myronenko told Military Times, noting that Mission Control had already passed key cybersecurity standards put forth by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

“It is so complex that it is checked by the Big Four every year,” he added, referring to the four largest cybersecurity consulting firms globally.

“And the security systems are completely located in the national protected network,” he said. “No one except the Ministry of Defense has access to it,” he said.

Access is distributed on a least-privilege basis. Brigade commanders see brigade-level data. Corps commanders see corps-level data.

If a device is lost or captured — “and this happens quite often in the war” — the system limits exposure. “There is no access to the system itself. Only to the data that the pilot had,” he said.

Asked whether centralizing all operational drone data in one system creates a risk that outweighs the benefit, Myronenko pushed back.

“The biggest risk is that when almost a million people are fighting, and we don’t understand how they fight – which ways work, which don’t work, which are effective, which are ineffective,” he said. “This is the biggest risk when you don’t control the situation.”

“Even if we imagine that the enemy will see which drones we kill, which of them are effective — well, it’s probably very bad,” he acknowledged. “But without data, we will not be able to do anything.”

Myronenko drew a clear line on what gets shared with international partners, too.

Raw operational data from Mission Control — the real-time feed of who’s flying what, where, and with what results — “it’s operative information, and we never share it with anyone,” he told Military Times. But analytics — trend data, effectiveness patterns, month-over-month changes — “of course, can be shared with our close partners.”

He declined to name specific countries currently involved in the system’s development, but said that allies had already been part of the system’s development process.

The next target for centralization under Ukraine’s MoD: artillery data.

“Because it’s the same logic,” Myronenko said. “We need to have the data. We need to have the complete picture. We need to speed up decision-making.”

These developments are key to strengthening the defensive capabilities of Ukraine and its allies, according to the deputy minister.

“We need to innovate faster than our enemy,” Myronenko said.