When Yuriy Shelmuk co-founded a company last year to make drone signal jammers, he said there was little interest in the devices. Now it produces 2,500 a month and has a six-week waiting list.
The demand changed after the failure of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 that was intended to put the invading Russian forces at a disadvantage. kyiv cited Russia’s extensive use of unmanned aerial vehicles to locate and attack targets, as well as large numbers of land mines and troops.
“Cheap, concentrated aerial drones stopped all of our assaults,” Shelmuk said. “There was an understanding that a new game changer had emerged”.
The vast majority of the more than 800 companies in Ukraine’s burgeoning defense production sector were founded after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, which reaches its thousandth day on Tuesday.
Many were established in response to rapidly changing battlefield conditions, including drones, first in the air and then also on land and sea, as well as anti-drone technology and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
“The Ukrainian military-industrial sector is the fastest innovating in the entire world at the moment”said Halyna Yanchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker who has advocated for local arms manufacturers in parliament.
Both Ukraine and Russia are on track to manufacture around 1.5 million drones this yearmostly small “first-person view” vehicles that cost a few hundred dollars each and They can be piloted remotely to identify and attack enemy targets.
In February, Ukrainian troops were already saying that the preponderance of Russian drones made their free movement and the construction of fortifications difficult.
By the summer, as Russia began taking Ukrainian territory at the fastest pace since the early days of the conflict, most of the damaged military pickup trucks sported electronic warfare (EW) domes that would only have been placed on high-value equipment last year. .
Shelmuk’s company, Unwave, is one of about 30 firms that make such systems, which block signals and They use various means to disrupt the computer systems within the drones.
Most anti-drone EW systems block one, or at most a small number of radio frequencies, meaning Russian drone pilots can bypass interference by switching to a new frequency.
EW manufacturers therefore monitor Russian drone-related online chats to understand what frequencies their drones will use.
As losses mount and exhaustion sets in, Both sides in the war are trying to replace humans with machines.
Ukraine has had difficulty replenishing units depleted over time by fighting; Russia has reportedly turned to North Korea.
Seven officials and industry figures told Reuters that automation would be the main focus of battlefield innovation in the coming year.
“The number of infantrymen deployed in trenches has decreased significantlyand combat command can be done online from a remote point, which reduces the risk of personnel being killed,” said Ostap Flyunt, an officer with the 67th mechanized brigade.
Ukraine now has more than 160 companies building unmanned ground vehicles, according to state-backed defense accelerator Brave1. They can be used to deliver supplies, evacuate wounded, or carry remotely operated machine guns.
An army colonel, codenamed Hephaestus, recently left military service to begin building automated machine gun systems. It said six of its products were already replacing human gunners on the front lines, allowing them to operate weapons on a screen away from danger.
Flyunt said this was becoming more common: “Modern warfare is a confrontation of technologies for remote detection, jamming, and destruction, leaving the operator alone with the ability to make decisions about attacks.“, said.
Weapons Minister Herman Smetanin also said remote warfare, including the use of artificial intelligence, was on the rise.
“In the near future, this will be the main direction of development, robot warfare,” he told Reuters. “These are human lives, we need to protect them.”
Ukraine hopes an innovative defense sector will provide a new foundation for an economy devastated by the invasion.
The country has invested $1.5 billion to upgrade defense manufacturing, which had stagnated since Soviet times, arms minister Smetanin said, although it still relies on Western allies for projectiles, missiles and air defenses.
Defense production capacity has grown from $1 billion in 2022 to $20 billion in 2024, but Ukraine can only afford to buy about half of that, the minister said, leaving extra manufacturing capacity unused.
Some manufacturers complain about strict limits on profit margins and a lack of long-term state procurement contracts, a problem that President Volodimir Zelensky has said he intends to address.
Four companies with which Reuters spoke also said they were struggling to find enough qualified staff.
Kateryna Mykhalko, director of Tech Force in UA, an association of private defense manufacturers, said 85% of the 38 companies surveyed by her organization were considering moving operations abroad or had already done so.
The thorniest issue for many is the ban on wartime arms exports that companies want repealed to generate capital for expansion. Officials are concerned about public disapproval of a country at war that relies on aid while exporting weapons.
(With information from Reuters)
