Ukraine on track to make more ‘mortar drones’ than planned: official

• Ukraine set out to produce more than 1 million small, attack drones by the end of the year.
• A top Ukrainian official said Kyiv will make “significantly” more than the original target.
• The country’s defense-industrial base has taken off, as homemade weaponry skyrockets. 

A top Ukrainian official said that his country is on track to churn out “significantly” more small attack drones by the end of the year than it originally set out to make as it continues to expand its weapons production capacity.

Oleksandr Kamyshin, who serves as Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries, shared in December that Kyiv planned to produce 1 million first-person-view, or FPV, drones by 2025. He said the country is also able to make over 10,000 mid-range attack drones capable of traveling hundreds of miles and more than 1,000 drones that can specifically reach targets more than 600 miles away throughout the year.

“This year we will produce significantly more than 1 million” of the FPV drones, Kamyshin told Business Insider this week, providing an update on the production efforts but declining to provide specific figures. “Mid-range strikers, long-range strikers — the goals will be outperformed as well,” he said.

Throughout much of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, FPV drones have been heavily featured in combat. Both sides have effectively managed to turn these systems — which are cheap and in abundance — into precision munitions by strapping explosives to them and using them to strike everything from armored vehicles to the soldiers in the trenches.

Kamyshin said during an interview with BI on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington, DC, that the FPV drones are a “significant share of the war in these days.” He referred to FPV drones as “mortar drones” and “artillery drones” in a nod to their explosive potential that’s similar to the ranged weapons.

Ukraine has other unmanned systems as well and regularly uses its medium- and long-range attack drones — which are larger than the cheap, hobby-style FPV ones — to carry out strikes deep inside Russian territory and target high-profile military and energy facilities.

These homemade weapon systems have given Kyiv the capability to greatly extend its reach beyond the border, especially as it continues to face restrictions on using Western-provided weapons for such purposes.

“We proved that there are no red lines,” Kamyshin said.

“Now, we can reach Russia by deep inside, like 1500 kilometers easily, and we showed that dozens and dozens — if not hundreds — of times,” he said, noting that “that’s the impact our industry is making in this war.”

The increased drone output comes amid broader efforts to scale-up Ukraine’s defense-industrial base. The country has gone from almost nonexistent production before Russia’s full-scale war to now cranking out weapons at a breakneck pace, which is helping to grow the domestic economy.

Kyiv is also taking greater steps to integrate its growing defense industry with that of NATO and the West and just opened an office in Washington to achieve that goal.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is taking its homemade weapons and modifying them for other missions. For instance, the country has outfitted its naval drones with missile and rocket launchers, and it has turned one of its anti-ship cruise missiles into a land-attack weapon. These innovations have helped Kyiv to inflict losses upon Russia.

Kamyshin attributed this to Ukrainian “resilience — the capability to withstand under the pressure, under the fire.”

Ukraine, however, is not the only side boosting its defense output in this war. Russia has placed its economy onto what experts say is a “Soviet-style” war footing and is rapidly producing its own weaponry, triggering alarm bells among some NATO allies.