Four Years After Russia’s Invasion, Ukraine Has Become a “Steel Porcupine”
The ongoing war has driven extremely rapid innovation in Ukraine’s defense sector—and many Western firms have taken note.
As Russia’s full-scale invasion enters its fifth year, it is clear that when Vladimir Putin announced the war, he did not envision a grinding campaign of attrition merely to inch forward in Ukraine. Western leaders initially believed Kyiv would fall within days or weeks. Instead, Ukraine defied those expectations, demonstrating the power of asymmetric warfare driven by unmanned systems. Now, it aims to build a powerful domestic defense industry for the future—in effect, a “steel porcupine” that Russia can never ingest.
In October 2025, Brandon Weichert wrote that building domestic air defense systems inside Ukraine would “make no difference” in Kyiv’s efforts to defend itself against Russia. His broader critique was that the “Build in Ukraine” initiative would likely “prove to be wholly insufficient to turn the tide of the war.”
This critique reflects a transactional reading of Russia’s war. It assumes Ukraine will eventually scale back its ambitions as costs mount. For Kyiv, however, this is not a limited war over negotiable territory. It is an existential fight for national survival. President Volodymyr Zelensky made that clear in his March 2022 address to the British Parliament, invoking Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be.”
This reading of the war also misunderstands how it has evolved since its early days in the winter of 2022. Throughout the conflict, I have spent time on the frontlines embedded with drone units. I witnessed firsthand how waves of Russian infantry were sent across open fields—only to be eliminated by small first-person-view (FPV) drones.
Indeed, drones have been estimated to account for up to 80 percent of Russia’s battlefield casualties. Former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wrote after recently meeting Zelensky in Munich that “80 per cent of the casualties Ukraine is inflicting on the Russians are from unmanned vehicles.” Ukrainian technologist and Victory Drones founder Mariia Berlinska estimated that by the end of 2025, in some sectors of the front, up to 90% of Russian personnel losses had been caused by drones and other battlefield technologies.
Faced with Western Hesitancy, Ukraine Must Build Its Own Systems
This is not the war that Moscow prepared for. Russian soldiers crossed the Ukrainian border in 2022 reportedly carrying parade uniforms for a victory celebration in Kyiv, rather than adequate supplies for a prolonged campaign. At the outset, many in the West doubted Ukraine would survive. Shortly before the full-scale invasion, Germany, Europe’s largest economy, initially offered 5,000 helmets, an offer that was widely ridiculed in Ukraine and abroad.
When Russia failed to achieve rapid victory, Western support scaled up, but rarely with the urgency required. Time and again, weapons deliveries were delayed or restricted. Equipment often arrived in limited quantities, sometimes in poor condition, and often lacked protection against drones. “We are thankful for every delivery. But HIMARS took months. Tanks took months. Jets took years. We cannot afford to lose a single day,” Zelensky observed at the Munich Security Conference in February.
Certain systems came with operational constraints that effectively tied Ukraine’s hands. The Biden administration and several European governments sought to support Ukraine without provoking escalation. Meanwhile, Moscow leveraged nuclear rhetoric and cognitive warfare to shape Western caution.
This pattern was visible after Ukraine pushed Russian forces out of Kherson and parts of Kharkiv oblast in 2022. As Kyiv gained momentum, Russia rattled the nuclear threat, and Western escalation fears reemerged, prompting Ukraine to slow its offensive. That pause allowed Moscow to regroup and construct the Surovikin Line in Ukraine’s east.
With restrictions limiting the use of Western-supplied weapons inside Russian territory, Moscow relocated logistics and staging areas across the border and continued striking Ukraine from behind the line of contact. Kyiv was left with little choice but to take the fight to Russian territory. When Ukrainian forces entered Kursk in 2024, reports suggested shock in Washington. Yet, as before, the feared Russian “escalation” never materialized.
Throughout the war, Russia has relied on external support. Iran assisted in the development and production of Shahed drones inside Russia. North Korea supplied munitions, labor, and eventually troops. China became a critical supplier of dual-use components, sustaining Russia’s missile and drone production. Meanwhile, according to the Kiel Institute, US military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine fell by 99 percent in 2025.
Yet in 2026, Ukraine is still standing. After four years of full-scale war, Russia has not captured a single new regional capital since Kherson was liberated in 2022. As Anatolii Tkachenko, commander of a mortar battery unit in Ukraine’s 92nd Separate Assault Brigade, put it: “In four years the USSR defeated Germany. In four years, the Russians have only managed to take half of Donetsk region.”
How Drones Saved Ukraine
The stalemate was not created by superior resources, but by adaptation. Babay, the deputy commander of the 63rd Separate Mechanized Brigade’s Unmanned Systems Battalion, told me that Ukraine had turned to what he called a “poor man’s solution”—pulling hobby drones off store shelves and converting them into disposable weapons and reconnaissance tools, making it nearly impossible for Russian units to move without being detected.
In time, these commercial drones would go on to help form Ukraine’s “drone wall.” Now Ukraine is producing millions of these, which Russia was forced to adapt to. Unable to achieve a decisive breakthrough, Moscow has increasingly relied on costly infantry assaults to probe and infiltrate Ukrainian lines in order to demonstrate incremental progress.
According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “Since February 2022, Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties, more losses than any major power in any war since World War II.” The report added that Russia’s campaign has had “an average rate of between 15 and 70 meters per day in their most prominent offensives, slower than almost any major offensive campaign in any war in the last century.”
Western officials assess that in January alone, Russia sustained roughly 9,000 more battlefield losses than it was able to replace. According to recent estimates, Russian soldiers killed in action reached as many as 35,000 in December. Ukrainian officials have openly discussed intensifying drone-enabled attrition to push Russia’s monthly casualty figure even higher, to 50,000—overwhelmingly caused by explosive-laden Ukrainian drones.
Drones may not be decisive in the traditional sense—they cannot turn the tide of a battle on their own—but they have been decisive in preventing Russia from achieving victory. As one Russian war correspondent complained, Ukrainian drone saturation has made even reaching the front line a “50–50” proposition, while the average life expectancy of a Russian assault trooper is reportedly around 12 days.
Ukraine’s Security Service has also said its Alpha special operations unit destroyed roughly half of Russia’s Pantsir air defense systems in 2025 through long-range strikes, with the systems valued at $15–20 million each. The strikes were aimed at weakening Russian air defenses and opening corridors for deeper aerial attacks, with the SBU estimating total air defense losses inflicted this year at around $4 billion. Meanwhile, Putin’s Valdai and Black Sea residences are reportedly protected by dense air defense rings, including 12–20 Pantsir-S1 systems alongside long-range S-400 batteries.
Ukraine’s Adaptation Velocity Is a Core Strategic Advantage
In fact, 96 percent of the drones fielded by Ukraine’s military—and 99 percent of the robotic systems it deploys—are produced inside Ukraine. Operating under severe resource and budget constraints, Ukrainian developers are forced to design durable systems at the lowest possible cost. The adaptation and countermeasure cycle has accelerated to the point where drone and weapons systems can be rendered obsolete in days or weeks rather than months.
Soldiers I have spoken to on the front describe an extremely compressed feedback loop. After deploying ground robots in combat, they return from a mission, call the manufacturer, explain the vulnerabilities or failures encountered, and see updated versions produced within days before redeploying again.
This cycle is brutal, but tremendously effective. In many cases, Western defense firms seek validation that their systems were “tested in Ukraine” in order to market more expensive platforms to their own governments. The issue is not necessarily that Western drones are poorly designed to begin with. Instead, once they encounter Russian electronic warfare, they are pulled into a rapid countermeasure cycle, forcing them to adapt in order to survive. Can these systems be modified and redeployed within days under active combat conditions? In most cases, the answer is no—at least not without lengthy procurement processes, or supply-chain bottlenecks that slow iteration cycles to a crawl.
“One of the things we have learnt from Ukraine is the need for manufacturing processes to be iterative and responsive to real-time feedback from the battlefield,” said Sunak.
Former CIA Director and retired General David Petraeus has warned that allies must avoid the trap of buying legacy systems rather than buying what is the future of warfare, which is in Ukraine. The gap was made plain during multinational exercises in Estonia, where a small Ukrainian drone team simulated the destruction of 17 armored vehicles and carried out around 30 additional strikes in half a day against a much larger NATO formation.
American defense firms have much to gain from working with the Ukrainians inside Ukraine. When US drone developer Shield AI sent its drones to Ukraine for testing, the systems initially failed under the pressure of Russian electronic warfare. Rather than withdraw, the company chose to stay and adapt. It established facilities inside Ukraine and began working directly with Ukrainian engineers and frontline operators. German defense startup Stark also recently opened a 2,000-square-meter research and development center in Ukraine and announced plans to build local drone production facilities.
“Establishing production in Ukraine requires real investment and a shift toward long-term industrial cooperation rather than short-term supply contracts,” said Deborah Fairlamb, founding partner of the Ukraine-focused venture capital firm Green Flag Ventures. “The fact that foreign companies are beginning to do this reflects growing trust and recognition of what Ukraine brings to partnerships—skilled labor, lower costs, and battlefield testing capabilities that exist nowhere else. A strong Ukrainian defense industrial base is not only in Ukraine’s interest, but in Europe’s as well, because Russia has proven it will remain a long-term threat.”
Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Col. Yuriy Myronenko recently said, “We have good software. We like technology. We like markets. This is our only chance to win.” Myronenko stressed that Ukraine’s advantage was not in the technology itself but in the speed of iteration, identifying what works and scaling it before Russia adapts. Indeed, the colonel observed that Ukraine could not hold a technological edge in the war: “If we receive technology, the enemy will receive it as well.”
With this in mind, Kyiv’s only enduring advantage lies in adaptation velocity—the ability to build effective systems at scale, iterate on them quickly under combat conditions, redeploy them rapidly, and do so at low cost. An additional benefit comes from reducing dependence on Chinese components, which has become a central focus for Ukrainian drone producers seeking greater supply chain resilience.
The Economics of Drone Warfare
Olena Kryzhanivska, a defense analyst, told me that localizing production inside Ukraine is both economically and strategically essential. Russia produces roughly 3 million artillery shells per year; as of January 2025, the firing ratio stood at about 2 to 1 in Moscow’s favor. Ukraine, now the largest consumer of artillery ammunition in the free world, must expand sustained production capacity at home and abroad to close that gap.
Kryzhanivska also notes that maintenance facilities for military vehicles are far more effective when located near the battlefield. Drone production in particular requires domestic localization to sustain its rapid 4–6 week iteration cycle without bureaucratic delays.
Achi, CEO of the Ukrainian defense technology company Ark Robotics, told Business Insider, “This iteration cycle is insane. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He noted that requirements for drones along the front lines could change within days—recalling that his team periodically needed to make five different modifications to a product within just a few weeks.
The innovation cycle has accelerated dramatically. What once took months now often takes weeks before a weapons system requires updates to beat newly-deployed enemy countermeasures. And while Russia has remained slower on the uptake than Ukraine, it, too, has adapted, finding ways to adjust its tactics to evade Patriot air defense systems and using electronic warfare to disrupt the GPS-guided rockets fired by systems such as HIMARS.
Even when advanced Western systems were provided, they have often been supplied in limited quantities, insufficient to fundamentally change the battlefield balance. Ukrainian leaders also recognize that simply killing more Russian soldiers will not end the war. The objective shifted toward raising the economic cost for the Kremlin and degrading Moscow’s capacity to sustain the fight.
Building the “Steel Porcupine”
As a result, throughout 2024 and 2025, Ukraine has invested heavily in domestic long-range drone and missile production, expanding its ability to strike deep inside Russia. Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s former defense minister, said in early 2025 that generating revenue to invest in domestic arms production had become Ukraine’s top priority. “The largest military laboratory on the planet is Ukraine,” he said.
Over the past year, Kyiv intensified its war against Russian oil, backed by Ukrainian drones and CIA intelligence. According to Bloomberg, Ukraine carried out roughly 120 strikes on Russian energy facilities in 2025—causing more than 1 trillion rubles (roughly $12.9 billion) in total losses, including over 100 billion rubles in direct damage to oil and gas infrastructure, according to insurance broker Mains.
The late Senator John McCain once described Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country.” It follows that by choking Russia’s oil and gas exports, the nation’s largest source of revenue, the Kremlin will be unable to continue to maintain its war machine. “While Moscow has found ways to shield itself from some of the effects of sanctions, it currently has no full protection against Ukrainian drones,” said Serhii Kuzan, chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center.
Ukrainian drones are now regularly flying over 1,000 kilometers deep into Russia, striking oil refineries and weapon production facilities. Ukraine is now aiming to build a missile market like it did for drone production.
In the Black Sea, Ukraine pushed back Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, neutralizing roughly a third of its vessels. Russian ships were forced to retreat from the Crimean Peninsula, occupied since 2014, and redeploy to Novorossiysk along the southern coast, effectively blockaded by Kyiv. Ukrainian naval drones have also downed Russian helicopters and several fighter jets, each worth tens of millions of dollars. Ukrainian Magura drones, costing an estimated $300,000 each, have sunk 14 Russian warships, typically valued in the tens of millions.
The crown jewel of Ukraine’s drone strikes inside Russia was Operation Spiderweb, a Ukrainian intelligence operation in June 2025 that used domestically produced drones smuggled into Russian territory to destroy elements of Russia’s nuclear-capable bomber fleet.
Nor is Kyiv only focused on offense. When Russian drones entered NATO airspace, including over Poland in September, the alliance lacked a scalable response. Ukraine, by contrast, has developed lower-cost drone interceptors. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski acknowledged the imbalance, saying it is uneconomical to defend airspace with F-35s and Sidewinder missiles against inexpensive drones.
The war’s transformation is an economic revolution. Conflict is becoming cheaper, decentralized, and technologically-driven. Since February 2022, Ukraine’s defense sector has grown into a network of more than 1,000 largely private firms. Many are starved for cash—yet output continues growing, even under the threat of Russian attacks.
More than 800 private and state-owned defense enterprises now employ roughly 300,000 skilled workers. Furthermore, 90 percent of foreign-invested companies operating in Ukraine report no plans to relocate, according to a recent survey.
By issuing export licenses, Kyiv is betting that global demand for Ukrainian battlefield-proven systems will finance the next phase of production. Zelensky already announced plans to establish 10 Ukrainian weapons export centers across Europe by 2026, alongside launching Ukrainian drone production lines in Germany and the United Kingdom.
Ukraine is rapidly expanding its own defense production. Domestically-produced Bohdana 155mm artillery systems now make up about 40 percent of Ukraine’s artillery usage on the front. By the end of 2025, more than half of all the weapons used by the Ukrainian army are said to have been made inside Ukraine. Ukraine has also developed a domestic air defense system, which was recently tested with 5 different types of missiles.
In 2025 alone, Ukraine authorized more than 1,300 new models of domestically produced weapons and military equipment for operational use—a 25 percent increase compared to the previous year. Ukrainian equipment is also often cheaper. For example, the Novator armored vehicle made by the company Ukrainian Armor costs at least 20 percent less than similar vehicles made in the West.
Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, noted in the Financial Times that Europe has the money while Ukraine has the technology and experience. In Ukraine, weapons are developed, tested, and produced much faster than in Europe. European firms have noticed this trend, and are increasingly partnering with Ukrainian counterparts:
- German firm Auterion and Ukraine’s Airlogix have formed a joint venture to produce AI-guided strike drones for Ukraine and NATO.
- Ukrainian robotics company Tencore and Germany’s FERNRIDE have also launched a joint venture to manufacture TerMIT unmanned ground vehicles.
- TAF Industries has partnered with Wingcopter to begin joint drone production in Germany, extending the “Build with Ukraine” model into EU and NATO markets.
- Across the Atlantic, the American tech company Axon also recently announced an investment in Ukrainian AI defense firm The Fourth Law.
The CEO of the French company Harmattan AI said European manufacturers have much to learn from Ukraine’s war tested defense industry, which has built systems that adapt quickly to battlefield conditions and evolve week by week. He argued that the problem is not just production capacity but how governments define and procure systems. In modern war, he said, delivering a good system quickly matters more than waiting for a perfect one.
To stay ahead, however, Ukraine cannot merely scale what works today. It must anticipate the next technological inflection point and invest before the battlefield forces it to adapt.
As Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief and its current ambassador to the United Kingdom, has argued, warfare is gradually becoming cheaper as technology advances, even as overall strike capabilities continue to grow. “This may ultimately create a situation in which Russia itself will need similar security guarantees – strange as that may sound,” he said.
Ukraine’s Challenges Are Far from Over
Still, manufacturing in Ukraine is not without its risks. A few months ago, a Russian drone barrage destroyed a main facility producing drones for Ukraine’s military, incinerating roughly $35 million worth of equipment and wiping out a large stockpile of weapons.
To mitigate that threat, some companies have adopted extraordinary measures. One Ukrainian drone producer described its operations as nomadic, relocating roughly once every quarter to make it harder for Russia to target and destroy its manufacturing sites.
According to industry surveys, more than 40 percent of Ukrainian defense manufacturers now operate five or more production sites across different regions. Production is deliberately fragmented into small technological segments so that a strike on one facility does not paralyze the company. Administrative teams and production units often work separately, reducing vulnerability to targeted disruption.
At the national level, the Defense Ministry has begun constructing underground manufacturing complexes to protect production from Russian guided bomb attacks. Ukraine has also moved part of its drone and missile production to Poland, creating external manufacturing redundancy beyond the reach of Russian strikes and reducing concentration risk.
The system survives not because it is well-funded, but because it adapts under pressure. “It’s in Ukraine’s interest to keep as many producers as possible inside the country,” said Vitaliy Goncharuk, CEO of A19Lab and former chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Committee of Ukraine.
Labor shortages present another structural challenge. With millions of men mobilized or serving at the front, Ukraine’s defense industry faces a tightening workforce. One potential solution lies in expanding female participation in the sector. Women currently make up roughly 82 percent of the unemployed population in Ukraine, representing a significant pool of skilled labor that could be mobilized to sustain and scale domestic production.
“I think Ukraine is going to become the heart of the European defense industry over the next decade – much as it was once the heart of the Soviet Union’s defense industry,” said General Ben Hodges, former commander of US Army Europe. “The technological capabilities of the people there, combined with deep residual engineering expertise and a rapidly growing talent base, make that inevitable.”
Hodges added that Ukraine’s long-term survival depends on becoming “indigestible.” That means maintaining a large, resilient population, the ability to mobilize quickly, and a strong domestic defense industry. “These are the foundations of deterrence.”
Kyiv understands that no piece of paper can guarantee its security, especially after the lessons of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Agreements can be signed, but they depend on political will, and years into the full-scale invasion Western leaders were often hesitant to provide weapons Ukraine urgently needed.
For Kyiv, a strong domestic defense industrial base that equips its own army and can eventually export at scale is the only durable safeguard. The goal is not necessarily to defeat Russia in one decisive campaign, but to make its aggression operationally futile. If Ukraine can adapt faster, produce at scale, and neutralize key capabilities across domains, Moscow may continue to fight but it will not be able to win.
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