Ukraine’s unmanned autonomous vehicles are cheap, adaptable, and battle-tested. Clients around the world are taking notice; not just the hardware, but the production methods, training, and know-how behind them.
Over the summer, Latvia and Lithuania have deepened ties with Ukrainian industry. In late July, Riga signed memoranda on technology transfer, local manufacturing, and testing infrastructure. Vilnius, meanwhile, is working to localise drone production under a bilateral defence agreement signed in May. Lithuania’s defence minister called it a Drone Deal and described it as a joint investment. The Baltic partnerships aim to give those states access to combat-proven drone capabilities while helping Ukraine expand production beyond its borders.
Countries are looking beyond simply buying drones from Ukraine. Latvia wants access to combat-proven drone capabilities. Lithuania is seeking to develop domestic assembly that can also meet Ukraine’s needs. Both hope to gain industrial know-how as well as military utility.
The far-reaching appeal
The appeal is obvious. Ukraine has built drones under pressure, in volume, and fast. As analysts note, Kyiv is “rewriting the global rules of air power and air defence, replacing sheer mass and large stockpiles of weapons as key factors in warfare with the benefits of quantity, speed, and the ability to learn faster than the enemy”.
Cost is part of the attraction. A Sting interceptor costs about $2.5k. A single US-made Patriot interceptor missile that does the same job costs more than $3m and requires significantly more time and resources to build and operate. Ukraine used about 700 Patriot interceptors in just four winter months in 2025–26. That gap helps explain foreign interest.
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By early 2026, Ukrainian firms were producing up to 1,000 interceptor drones each day. In February alone, these drones accounted for 70 per cent of Shahed intercepts in the Kyiv region. More than 500 companies now manufacture drones in Ukraine, with roughly 40 to 50 of them considered market leaders. The private sector makes up about 90 per cent of FPV output.
They want local industry. “By joining forces, we are creating a strong platform for the accelerated development of military and dual-use technologies in Latvia,” said Latvian Defence Minister Raivis Melnis. Latvia’s Minister of Economics Viktors Valainis added that collaborating with Ukrainian industry would provide access to “unique practical experience” while creating opportunities to develop new export products.
More than imports
Lithuanian Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas confirmed that his country is reorganising ministry teams to turn the accord into domestic assembly capabilities. “This would involve joint investments; however, beyond supporting Ukraine, we would also gain additional benefits — a technological breakthrough and opportunities for our engineers to advance alongside their Ukrainian counterparts,” Mr Kaunas told Verslo žinios, a Lithuanian newspaper of record.
The goal is also to allow Ukraine to expand its production footprint beyond the reach of Russian long-range strikes. That is a strategic calculation as much as an industrial one.
Kyiv may have more capacity to provide expertise, designs, training, and industrial partnerships than to deliver large volumes of finished systems.
— Arnaud Leveau, Paris Dauphine University
Dispersing production across friendly territory reduces vulnerability. It also deepens the defence ties between Kyiv and NATO’s eastern flank.
A wider market
The Philippines shows the model’s wider reach. Kyiv and Manila have agreed to draft a formal defence framework focused on joint drone production and the sharing of lessons from wartime experience. The talks followed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Manila in 2024 and marked the first official visit by Philippine defence officials to Ukraine in the history of bilateral relations.
A Philippine delegation led by National Defense Undersecretary Salvador Mison met with Ihor Zhovkva, deputy head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, in Kyiv. The Philippine side wants help with knowledge transfer, technology exchange, and cybersecurity cooperation. It fits Manila’s need to strengthen its military amid ongoing South China Sea tensions. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, want to deepen Indo-Pacific links and win ASEAN Sectoral Dialogue Partner status, with the Philippines chairing ASEAN this year.
Mr Zhovkva’s office stated: “The profile teams will establish a dialogue to exchange Ukrainian experience in waging war and implementing new practices in the defense sector.” That phrasing is revealing. Ukraine does not just sell drones. It sells wartime experience as well as an industrial habit: build, test, revise, and build again.
What partners are really buying
Arnaud Leveau, a geopolitics professor at Paris Dauphine University, told South China Morning Post that “Kyiv may have more capacity to provide expertise, designs, training, and industrial partnerships than to deliver large volumes of finished systems.” That is probably the core of the story.
Ukraine cannot easily export mass production in the way of a mature arms giant. War limits output. Strikes threaten plants, supply chains remain fragile. Almost 89 per cent of Ukrainian drone producers depend on Chinese components, and that supply chain has been tightening since 2023. Yet that same pressure has turned its drone sector into something more valuable in one respect: a living laboratory.
The Ukrainian feedback loop functions as a form of quality control conducted under real-world, rather than lab or test-field conditions. The European Union’s standard defence certification cycle can run years. Ukraine’s runs weeks. Some brigades rework up to half of the delivered drones before deploying them. It is the kind of improvisation that would grind most standard Western procurement programmes to a halt.
Knowledge, not just kit
Countries buying from Ukraine are not simply buying equipment. They are buying access to a production culture built under fire. The Baltic states are trying to embed that culture at home. The Philippines is trying to tap into it for maritime security. When a country buys a billion-dollar Patriot battery, it acquires defence capability, but not the seller’s knowledge and ability to adapt. When the threat changes (as it did with Iran’s massive Shahed attacks in March 2026) the buyer needs to return to the market.
By joining forces, we are creating a strong platform for the accelerated development of military and dual-use technologies in Latvia.
— Raivis Melnis, Latvia’s defence minister
Ukraine created an industrial system in which knowledge is local, adaptation is ongoing, and responding to new threats does not require a call to Washington. That is what foreign partners seem to want. And if demand now stretches from NATO’s eastern flank to South-East Asia, Ukraine’s chief military export may be no single model, but a method.
That method remains shaped by war. It depends on urgency, improvisation, and constant feedback from the front. In a world where big arsenals can be slow and costly, that may be enough to keep Ukraine’s drones in demand.
The European connection
The EU policy link is now explicit. The European Commission’s 11 February 2026 Action Plan on Drone and Counter-Drone Security proposes a Drone Security Package, an EU Trusted Drone label, and tighter support for mass production, including a Drone Alliance with Ukraine. Separate parliamentary work has also pointed to faster intra-EU transfers of drone-related technology under a law on dual-use items, which is the clearest legislative hook for the industry connection.
Europe already has drone makers of meaningful scale, even if few match Ukraine’s wartime output. Germany’s Quantum Systems, France’s Parrot and Delair, Poland’s WB Group, and Germany’s Helsing all appear in current European drone-company rankings and defence-tech coverage as significant players. The European Commission also says it is accelerating the sector through Horizon Europe, the European Defence Fund, and a Civil-Defence Drone Testing Centre Network, while it works on a voluntary ‘European Trusted Drone’ label.
