How Ukraine became a drone factory and invented the future of war

New Scientist · Feb 24, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Killhouse Academy, run by the 3rd Assault Brigade, is Ukraine’s leading drone-pilot school. Its R&D chief (pictured) is known as SharkMykhaylo Palinchak The grinding, attritional war between Russia and Ukraine is now entirely dominated by drones. Russia pummels Ukraine with long-range kamikaze aircraft and Ukraine knocks them out of the sky with specialised interceptors. The front line has transitioned from an artillery battle to a first-person-view drone fight, while ground-based robots are increasingly used to deliver ammunition and supplies, launch attacks and evacuate the wounded. As a result, in the four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has created from nothing an entire industry and ecosystem capable of designing, manufacturing and operating a variety of ingenious drones. New Scientist was granted access to the pilot schools, labs and factories that are the engine room of this new industry – one that Kyiv hopes to make beneficial and profitable, selling expertise and devices to Western states, once the war is over. Taras Ostapchuk’s sudden transition from civilian life to the military is a common story in Ukraine today. Before the war, he ran a company making streetlights. He enrolled in the army in 2022 and ended up as an aerial drone pilot. An injury ended his military career in 2024, but he wanted to keep contributing to the war effort, so he started a new company to make drones, turning to YouTube and internet forums to find out how to do it. That company, Ratel Robotics, now employs more than 300 people and sells a range of ground drones designed for everything from placing and clearing landmines to evacuating injured troops and delivering supplies and ammunition. I travelled to a nondescript and empty field some way outside Kyiv, where machine gunfire from a nearby army training ground echoed in the morning fog, to see some of Ratel’s current line-up in testing. Soon, a van towing a trailer arrived and three men emerged. Within minutes, a pair of machines, each around the size of a ride-on lawnmower, were zipping around under remote control. The four-wheeled Ratel M and its six-wheeled big brother Ratel X are surprisingly nimble, given their bulk, and can spin 360 degrees on the spot. The larger of the two can carry a 600-kilogram load at 12 kilometres per hour over more than 100 kilometres. With its flat top, it can ferry any kind of supplies and ammunition to where they are needed while keeping humans and expensive vehicles out of harm’s way. Many parts of the front line are now so vulnerable to drone attacks that a petrol or diesel truck – with a hot engine glaringly easy to spot on infrared cameras – is a sitting duck. Ratel’s drones are fully electric and virtually silent when moving slowly, winding up into a whir as they pick up speed. I watch them climb steep slopes, splash through mud and chase each other around the field. I am invited to hop on board with two Ratel engineers and the robot zooms around the training ground, seemingly unaware of our extra weight. It is easy to imagine the relief you would feel as one of these arrived with vital supplies, or if you were a wounded soldier being picked up and evacuated. And operators can be kilometres behind the front line, or even on the other side of the world, working in safety from a laptop via a Starlink connection. To my surprise, I am handed the controls and find it instantly familiar – like driving a remote-controlled car. Already, 100 of these particular models are in use on the front line – and while most of the missions they are used for are secret, I’m told that one was still able to operate recently with two wheels blown off. Ostapchuk tells me of another mission where one of his devices, laden with 400 kilograms of explosive, silently crawled up to a building full of Russian soldiers before detonating. “I enjoy what I do,” he says. A Ratel operator steers uncrewed ground vehicles across a testing field outside Kyiv, UkraineMykhaylo Palinchak The damage one device can do is staggering, but the cost is surprisingly low. The six-wheeled Ratel H costs just $55,000, complete with a trailer, a Starlink dish, a laptop and a controller. Ostapchuk says that a comparable machine from a European supplier costs €350,000 and wasn’t nearly as capable when tested. It also relied heavily on Chinese components, a security risk that Ratel is working hard to get away from by developing its own motors. “China is a big problem, in my mind, for all the world. Europe should decide who will build weapons and robots for the next war,” says Ostapchuk. The difference between defence firms in Ukraine versus the rest of Europe is, of course, that Ukraine is already at war, with drone developers testing their equipment daily in battle and receiving constant feedback, says Ostapchuk. I get the impression that there is no greater incentive for speedy R&D than Russian soldiers fighting their way towards your city. Warfare moves skywards While ground drones like those produced by Ratel are increasingly important for Ukraine’s military, aerial drones are how the bulk of the war is being fought. A military source in Kyiv tells me that at least 60 per cent of all casualties – on both sides – are killed by first-person-view (FPV) drones, controlled by a human operator watching through an on-board camera. Among Russia’s most-feared weapons are the Iranian-made Shahed drones, which look like a cross between a missile and a small plane. I saw an undetonated one propped upright in a military hanger, looming over me at 2.6 metres long. Up close, the drones are intimidating, but Ukrainians have become accustomed to the constant risk that a wave of them might make it past air defences – they are launched in great numbers designed to overwhelm countermeasures – and strike their homes, workplaces or schools with 15-kilogram payloads. On the train to Kyiv, a woman tells me of the constant struggle over whether to seek shelter during these nightly drone raids. “Do I want to sleep, or do I want to live?” she says. She says the answer is different each night, but social media channels offer advice on what type of bombardment is going on and which regions are being targeted. Later, from my hotel bed in the capital, I hear several Shaheds being taken out by Ukrainian defences, but also some making their way through to damage nearby homes. Mindful of her advice, I decide the strikes sound far enough away for me to stay in bed. A scientist I meet in the north of Ukraine describes the sight when machine guns near the border intercept a wave of Shaheds. “It looks like Star Wars because they use tracer bullets: green, red, different colours,” he says. Any Shaheds that make it past the guns face a final line of Ukrainian interceptor drones. To learn more about these, I meet Marko Kushnir from aerial drone-maker General Cherry at a cafe in Kyiv. He leads me to an outwardly unremarkable office building nearby that houses a research, manufacturing and testing plant. The location of these factories is closely guarded: General Cherry has multiple similar sites around Ukraine, and Kushnir says that one was recently struck by a Russian Shahed drone, whether by chance or design. The company makes more than two dozen types of drone, each specialised for a different task, but several are designed purely to intercept Shaheds en route to Ukrainian cities. One that Kushnir is particularly proud of is the Bullet. Shaped like a spaceship from a 1950s sci-fi film, it takes off vertically like a normal drone then pivots to the horizontal to reach as much as 310 kilometres per hour. “It’s like a drone missile. You use it like a little rocket,” says Kushnir. General Cherry’s factory isn’t what I expect from a defence company – it feels more like an internet start-up. The workforce is young, occupying colourful offices where the break room has a pool table, table football, a games console and a huge television. But the people here aren’t tapping away at keyboards. Instead, workers solder components, fit propellers or install batteries, shipping thousands of lethal drones every day to supply fighters across Ukraine. A General Cherry interceptor drone is tested in an indoor facility, one of many covert locations across UkraineMykhaylo Palinchak One sealed room hums with the sound of 90 busy 3D printers, all running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. These make propellers, chassis and various other components, consuming 500 kilograms of plastic filament each week. Staff are currently trying to fit another 10 printers in this room, but it’s hard to see where they will go. Making parts like this not only reduces reliance on foreign suppliers, but also lets General Cherry iterate rapidly on feedback from the front line. Every spare inch of the factory is stacked high with drones of varying models, easily numbering into the thousands, and Kushnir says these are built, tested and shipped out every day. Exact production numbers are sensitive secrets, but Kushnir happily reveals that hundreds of thousands of FPV drones are used up – crashed into the enemy and detonated – every month. He knows of one group of 15 pilots that gets through 25,000 each month. “Two years ago, this was like science fiction,” says Kushnir. “Three years ago, we had only three tables and we produced 20 FPVs per month; now we make more than 80,000.” General Cherry now has hundreds of employees around Ukraine, none of whom knew anything about drones before the war. In a final room at General Cherry is a netted enclosure where each and every drone is tested. Two teenage boys sit at a gap in the net. One switches on each drone in turn, establishing a connection with a controller and throwing it inside. The other puts the drone through its paces for 20 seconds, noisily zipping from the top to the bottom of the enclosure, edge to edge, spinning in every direction and landing back at the same spot. This is the first of only two flight