PARIS — Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence will provide its combat units with 2.5 billion hryvnia (US$60 million) of direct funding per month to procure their own drones, in a move to allow commanders in the field to buy the equipment they need rather than rely on centralized purchasing.
The ministry already provided 2.1 billion hryvia directly to combat units in December for buying drones, and decided to scale up the initiative based on that experience, officials said in a Jan. 22 statement. Allowing troops to buy unmanned aerial vehicles directly allowed for rapid fulfillment of service members’ needs while increasing diversification, the ministry said.
“Commanders of the units will have the flexibility to use these funds to acquire the drones that are the most effective for carrying out mission requirements at the front,” Minister of Defence Rustem Umerov said in the statement. “This marks another step towards building a highly flexible system to ensure the military has everything necessary for Ukraine’s defense.”
In Ukraine, long guns become desperate defenses against small drones
Ukraine has been a crucible for drone innovation as it fights off Russia’s invasion, with troops using unmanned systems for everything from intelligence gathering to strike operations, as decoys or for laying mines. Western militaries are closely studying the new ways UAVs are being used on the Ukrainian battlefield – including air-to-air drone combat, use of artificial intelligence, fiber-optic controls, bomber drones and more – to see what lessons to apply to their own forces.
The funds to buy drones will be distributed among the brigades of the armed forces after Ukraine’s Cabinet of ministers backed the proposal by the ministry, the MoD said.
Drones can be made more profitably in Ukraine than anywhere else in Europe, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier in January. The country raised its drone manufacturing capacity to 4 million units a year, the president said at a defense industry forum in October, compared with production of about 300,000 drones in 2023.
Domestic production accounted for more than 96% of the drones used by the armed forces, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said last month. The Ministry of Defence, together with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, had contracted 1.6 million UAVs of various types in the first 10 months of 2024, with 1.3 million drones delivered, it said in October.
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