Ukraine has gathered hundreds of millions of dollars and trained 10,000 drone pilots for a counteroffensive to reclaim land from Russia.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister for innovation Mykhailo Fedorov said on Thursday that the pilots had been trained through the crowdfunding platform Unite d24’s Army of Drones project.
Ukraine Drone System
Ukraine collected $325 million throughout the year. It’s fascinating that 110 different countries have contributed to this fundraising effort.
This week, Ukraine’s drone program has been in the news again due to a series of attacks on Russian infrastructure targets in the vicinity of the front lines; Kyiv has not confirmed or denied involvement for these attacks.
Leaders in Ukraine have denied responsibility for what appeared to be a dual-drone attack on the Kremlin this week, which some have speculated may have been a Russian “false flag” operation designed to legitimize a stepping up of Moscow’s shelling of Ukrainian cities.
Kyiv is making drones an increasingly vital part of its military arsenal. UAVs capable of air-to-air combat against hostile drones are among the military drones Fedorov has indicated Ukraine plans to produce.
It has been revealed that Ukraine already has both semi-autonomous attack drones and artificial intelligence-powered counter-drone weapons at its disposal.
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More Advanced Weapons
Drones of varied sizes and capacities have proven pivotal to the ongoing battle, with frontline forces employing them for anything from observation and artillery spotting to bombing missions against enemy units and locations (using either kamikaze weaponry or grenade drops). There are a lot of commercial UAVs out there.
Both the Ukrainian military and the Russian military have frequently used longer-range, more sophisticated drones to strike infrastructure targets well behind the battle lines.
Several other branches of the Ukrainian government are also making progress on drone acquisition initiatives.
According to March statements made by Yuriy Shchigol, head of Ukraine’s State Service for Special Communications, the government plans to spend some $867 million on military drones, the most majority of which will be manufactured in Ukraine.
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