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Ukraine’s defense industry is rapidly producing a range of domestically produced weapons as it seeks to meet the needs and requirements of soldiers fighting on the front lines, but one senior official said Kyiv still lacks key materials to continue delivering arms.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine produced very little weaponry for its own military, relying heavily on existing stockpiles of Soviet-era materials and support from international partners. Now the country is producing its own drones, artillery, missiles and more at breakneck speed to supplement those stockpiles.
“I don’t really focus on how we succeeded, but we did,” Ukrainian Minister of Strategic Industry Oleksandr Kamyshin told Business Insider on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Washington last week.
“We have a few challenges. Just a few. One is energy – explosives and propellants, and maybe that’s it,” Khmeishin explained, reflecting on Ukraine’s efforts to build up its defenses. “No country produces enough,” he said, calling it a global challenge. “So if you get more ammunition, you produce more ammunition.”
Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars in security assistance from NATO since the start of the war, including more than $53 billion from the United States alone. But as the conflict has progressed, the local defense industry has Steady contribution Supply Kiev’s frontline troops with more of their own military equipment.
A homemade prototype drone is tested with a fake grenade in a field outside Kiev in November 2022. Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
These domestic efforts complement foreign arms supplies: Ukraine will always depend on Western support, Kamyshin said, because no one can currently produce weapons better than Russia.
Russia also receives a flow of arms from abroad, most of it publicly known to come from North Korea and Iran, but Moscow is investing a significant percentage of its GDP in its military, putting its economy on what experts say is a Soviet-style war footing.
Russia’s rapid domestic arms production has raised alarms among some NATO allies and highlighted the need for Ukraine to prioritize domestic manufacturing, which is helping to grow the country’s economy.
From breadbasket to arsenal
“We are putting all our efforts into the war,” Kamyshin said, noting that most of the budget is being spent on the war. He said Ukraine cannot compete with Russia in terms of funding and manpower, so it is prioritizing quality over quantity.
“That’s why we have to surpass others in the quality of our weapons, the quality of our personnel. That’s the only way we can endure,” he said.
One notable area of ​​success in this war has been Ukraine’s domestic drone development program. Kiev has used long-range attack drones to target military and energy facilities deep inside Russian territory, and has relied on explosive-laden naval drones to attack Moscow’s warships in the Black Sea.
Ukraine’s multipurpose naval drone, the Magura V5, during a demonstration in April. Photo credit: Pablo Bahumt/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Ukraine is also mass-producing first-person view (FPV) drones, which have become a regular presence on the battlefield and serve as an inexpensive means of delivering precision strikes against enemy armored vehicles and personnel.
Drones are not Ukraine’s only innovation: Ukraine also developed a domestic anti-ship missile, the Neptune, which it used to sink the Russian cruiser Moskva, flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, early in the war. Kiev later adapted the missile for land attacks.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is taking further steps towards further integrating its domestic defense industry with those of NATO and the European Union. Kiev recently opened an office in Washington to achieve this goal, Deeper collaboration With Western arms manufacturers.
“They called us the ‘breadbasket’ [the] “The Soviet Union, at that time it was called the ‘breadbasket’ of Europe,” Kamyshin said. “We were always a good, peaceful, agricultural country. I was a farmer myself.”
“At some point, they came and started killing us, and we had to learn how to fight again,” he said. “It was not our decision to turn from a breadbasket into an arsenal.”
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