Verity Bowman

In tiny workshops scattered across Ukraine, a war machine is being built at a pace that has left Nato’s most powerful members standing still.

In May alone, Ukraine’s ministry of defence certified 175 new weapons systems for operational use, nearly 93 per cent of them designed and built entirely within the country.

Germany, by comparison, certified fewer than 20 new systems in the whole of 2024 – its fastest year on record.

The United States fields between two and five genuinely new platforms per year, with procurement cycles averaging 10 years.

Four years ago, Ukraine was desperately importing whatever its allies would send. Today, it is certifying six new weapons systems every day.

“Put it all together, and you’ve got a defence procurement ecosystem that is completely unrecognisable compared with anywhere else in Europe,” said Keir Giles, an associate fellow of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme and the author of Who Will Defend Europe.

The question is how a country under sustained bombardment managed to build this in four years.

The answer, according to Mr Giles, begins not with the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022 but in 2014, when Russia first seized Crimea and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

“It’s not from scratch,” he said. “Some industries and innovations have obviously been kick-started by the war, but Ukraine had already spent eight years before the full-scale invasion developing these capabilities; there is a deep reservoir of experience, particularly in outsourcing to private industry, that Ukraine has built upon rather than invented.”

What the full-scale invasion changed was the speed. Under the pressure of an existential threat, Ukraine stripped out bureaucracy that in other countries causes procurement to take years or decades.

It adopted a “fail fast” principle: if a weapon works, adopt it; if it doesn’t, discard it, with far less cost and delay than a Western-style proving process would involve.

It pushed development down to individual battalions, which now update and modify their own equipment in the field.

“Ukraine’s defence ecosystem is turbocharged by initiatives like the Brave1 military tech marketplace, where units purchase what they know works well,” explained Robert Tollast, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “Their will for survival and lethality drives efficiency.”

The 175 new weapons range from interceptor drones and ground robots to ballistic missiles and armoured vehicles.

Among the newly certified drones, including the Tin, Tur, Mamba, Palii, and D’Artagnan, is the Lupynis-10-TFL-1.

It was developed by The Fourth Law, a “miltech” start-up founded in 2023 by Yaroslav Azhnyuk, whose previous company made remote-controlled pet cameras.

What makes it remarkable is what “first level of autonomy” means in practice.

For most of its flight, a human operator retains control. But in the final 500 metres, where Russian electronic warfare is most intense and jamming most likely to sever the pilot’s connection, the drone’s onboard AI takes over entirely, identifying and locking on to its target without human input.

The company says this increases mission success rates by two to five times, at an additional cost of just 10 to 20 per cent.

“In essence, this is an internal weapons market where every manufacturer and every idea has the opportunity to be realised, with the best and most effective designs ultimately remaining,” said Dmytro Zhmailo, deputy head of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre.

Another crucial new drone is the Sichen, built for deep strikes at ranges of up to 870 miles, carrying an 88lb warhead.

Its ability to navigate active electronic warfare enables Ukraine to carry out strikes within Russia despite Moscow’s campaign of drone interference and hijackings.

Ground robots, including the Gnom, Primar-Killer, Vepr, Plyushch+ and Ratel X, which were all approved in May, are also key.

Most significant is the Ratel X, a low-profile combat robot capable of reconnaissance, mine-laying and casualty evacuation in the line of fire, as well as launching its own fibre-optic FPV attack drones directly from the battlefield.

Ukrainian forces have already captured a Russian position using only robots and UAVs.

Mr Zhmailo said the driving force behind Ukraine’s ground robotics push was the emergence of so-called kill zones, which are sections of the front line up to 20km deep under constant fire from both sides, where sending in soldiers had become tantamount to sentencing them to death.

“In certain situations, robotic systems and drones make it possible to keep personnel away from the zone of direct fire contact, reducing the risk of injury or death, and thus minimising the loss of Ukraine’s most valuable asset: its people.”

The push for autonomy does not stop at the front line.

Ukraine has also quietly built a domestic missile programme from scratch, with the FP-7 ballistic missile with a 200km range already in active service.

The more powerful FP-9, with a reported range of 850km and an 800kg warhead capable of reaching Moscow, is expected to complete testing this summer.

And the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, with a range of 3,000km and a 1,150kg warhead, has already struck targets more than 1,500km inside Russia.

“Ukraine had little option but to develop its own alternatives, as we’ve seen with the long-range strikes into the heart of Russia using technologies that were developed in Ukraine, because the United States did not wish to allow Ukraine to strike into Russia,” said Mr Giles.

While Ukraine relies on smaller factories set up by former civilians, Russia’s approach is the opposite: a state-controlled monopoly concentrated in facilities such as Alabuga, producing one weapon at a massive scale with no competition and no incentive to innovate.

It is dangerous in its raw volume, but brittle in its inability to adapt.

Mr Tollast argued that the comparison increasingly favours Ukraine, not just because of its dispersal model but because of its growing two-way pipeline with Western defence firms.

“Initially we learned a vast amount from Ukraine’s innovation,” he said, “but this is increasingly a two-way pipeline of talent and material.”

The West, meanwhile, has been watching and largely failing to draw the right lessons.

“Of course, corners are being cut in Ukraine,” said Mr Giles. “But the corners being cut are the ones that make British defence programmes take decades.”

Ukraine’s domestic defence production capacity has grown from $20bn (£15bn) in 2024 to $35bn (£26.2bn) in 2025, with output forecast to reach $50bn (£37.5bn) this year, a figure that would make it one of the largest defence producers in Europe.

The lesson for Europe, Mr Giles said, is that it should not wait until it faces the same existential pressure to reform its own procurement processes.

“Ukraine needs to win the war. And Europe needs Ukraine, because it has developed all of these technologies and capabilities.”