Ukraine's defense industry boom caught Putin by surprise. Kiev's weapons strike in the heart of Russia
A nation under siege has abandoned military bureaucracy in favor of lethal efficiency: “If it works, build it!”.
The Ukrainian Flamingo rocket / PHOTO: AFP
In clandestine workshops, scattered throughout the territory of Ukraine, a war machine is assembled at a dizzying pace, which leaves behind even the most powerful NATO member states, writes The Guardian.
In May alone, the Ministry of Defense in Kyiv approved no less than 175 new weapons systems for operational use. The percentage is absolutely staggering: almost 93% of them are designed and built entirely in Ukraine.
By comparison, Germany – a European industrial powerhouse – certified fewer than 20 new systems during the entire year 2024, a performance considered a historic record for Berlin anyway. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States puts into service between two and five truly new platforms a year, while Pentagon procurement cycles average a decade.
If four years ago Ukraine was desperately importing whatever military equipment its allies were willing to send, today Kiev approves six new weapons systems every day.
“If you put all these pieces together, you get a defense procurement ecosystem that is completely unrecognizable compared to anywhere else in Europe,” explains Keir Giles, research associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House and author of the volume “Who Will Defend Europe?”.
The legacy of 2014 and the elimination of red tape
The legitimate question on the lips of all military analysts is how a country under constant bombardment managed to build such an industry in just four years.
The answer, according to Keir Giles, originates not in Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, but in 2014, when Moscow illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula and triggered the hybrid conflict in Donbas. Ukraine did not start from scratch. Certain industries and innovations were obviously boosted by total war, but Kiev had already accumulated eight years of experience in developing these capabilities, relying heavily on outsourcing services to the private sector, notes the British publication.
What fundamentally changed the invasion of 2022 was the speed of execution. Under the pressure of an existential threat, Ukraine has completely eliminated the red tape that, in Western countries, makes procurement processes drag on for years or even decades.
Ukrainians adopted a pragmatic principle: “fail fast”. If a weapon works on the front, it is immediately adopted; if not, it is quickly abandoned, reducing the costs and delays that rigid Western testing would entail. Moreover, technological development has been decentralized down to the level of individual battalions, who modify and improve their equipment directly in the trenches.
Robert Tollast, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), explains: “Ukraine's defense ecosystem is boosted by initiatives like the military tech platform Brave1, where units buy directly what they know works in the field. Their desire for survivability and lethality is the driver of this effectiveness.”
From AI drones to combat robots
The 175 new weapons range from interceptor drones and ground robots to ballistic missiles and armored vehicles. Among the newly certified drones are models such as Tin, Tur, Mamba, Palii or D'Artagnan, but the piece de resistance is the Lupynis-10-TFL-1.
Anti-drone nets were installed on the highway near Putin's residence in Valdai
It was developed by The Fourth Law, a military technology start-up founded in 2023 by Iaroslav Ajniuk, an entrepreneur whose previous company produced remotely monitored video cameras for pets.
The major innovation lies in the implementation of the “first level of autonomy”. During most of the flight, the drone is guided by a human operator. But in the last 500 meters – the critical zone where Russian electronic warfare becomes extremely intense and jamming can cut the connection with the pilot – the on-board artificial intelligence takes complete control. The drone identifies and locks onto the target without any human intervention. This upgrade increases the mission success rate by two to five times, adding only 10-20% to the production cost.
Another strategic weapon is the Sichen drone, designed for deep strikes at distances of up to 1,400 kilometers, capable of carrying an explosive charge of 40 kilograms. Its ability to navigate electronic jamming allows Ukraine to strike targets inside the Russian Federation, defying Moscow's systems.
On the land segment, bots like Gnom, Primar-Killer, Vepr, Pliushch+ and Ratel X are game changers. The most important is the Ratel X, a low-profile combat robot capable of performing front-line reconnaissance, mining and casualty evacuation missions, as well as launching its own FPV attack drones via fiber optics directly from the battlefield.
Dmitro Jmailo, deputy director of the Ukrainian Center for Security and Cooperation, points out that the engine behind this massive robotization is the emergence of so-called “death zones” – frontline sectors up to 20 km deep, under constant fire, where sending soldiers is tantamount to a death sentence. The robots keep the military out of direct fire, protecting Ukraine's most valuable resource: its people.
The domestic missile program means strikes in the heart of Russia
Kiev's military autonomy does not stop at drones. Ukraine has secretly developed its own ballistic missile program. The FP-7 missile, with a range of 200 km, is already active. The more powerful model, the FP-9 (estimated range of 850 km and an 800 kg warhead), capable of reaching Moscow, is yet to complete testing. In parallel, the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile (3,000 km range and 1,150 kg payload) has already hit targets more than 1,500 km inside Russia.
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Ukraine was practically forced to develop these strategic alternatives. Since the United States has long refused to allow Western weapons to be used to strike Russian territory, Kiev has responded with technology of its own.
While Ukraine relies on the flexibility of small private workshops, Russia's approach is diametrically opposed: a state-controlled monopoly, concentrated in mammoth facilities like the one at Alabuga, producing a single weapon on an industrial scale, with no competition and no incentives for innovation. The Russian model is dangerous in its raw volume, but rigid in the face of adaptation.
The lesson the West refuses to learn
Ukraine's domestic defense production capacity has exploded: from $20 billion in 2024 to $35 billion in 2025, with estimates for this year indicating a volume of $50 billion. This figure makes Ukraine one of the largest producers of military equipment in Europe.
The West watches, but fails to draw the right conclusions. Sure, procedural compromises are made in Ukraine because of the state of war, but those bureaucratic “shortcuts” are exactly what make British or European defense programs last decades.
The hard lesson for Europe is that it should not wait for similar existential pressure to reform its own procurement mechanisms. Ukraine needs to win the war, but equally, Europe needs Ukraine and the revolutionary technology it has developed in the trenches.
