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Team

Kollen Post photo

Kollen Post

Defense Industry Reporter

Kollen Post is the defense industry reporter at the Kyiv Independent. Based in Kyiv, he covers weapons production and defense tech. Originally from western Michigan, he speaks Russian and Ukrainian. His work has appeared in Radio Free Europe, Fortune, Breaking Defense, the Cipher Brief, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, FT’s Sifted, and Science Magazine. He holds a BA from Vanderbilt University.

Articles

Putin holds advantage ahead of Trump meeting, expert says

by Kollen Post, Jason Blevins
The Kyiv Independent’s Kollen Post sits down with Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia and political scientist, to discuss the upcoming high-level talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, scheduled for Aug. 15 in Alaska, as well as both sides’ strategies for the meeting.
drones using fibre optics to fly at an undisclosed location in Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine, on Jan. 29, 2025

Ukraine is deploying new drones to target Russian armor beyond radio horizon

by Kollen Post
Ukraine’s drone manufacturers are scrambling to reach the Russian equipment that lurks beyond the radio horizon — the distance where the earth’s curvature blocks the video signal that Ukraine’s cheap strike drones depend on. Over the past year and a half, short-range drones, like first-person-view (FPV) drones, have cleared a no-man’s land of roughly 20 kilometers on either side of the front line, where neither Ukraine nor Russia dares to put high-value weapons. The area just beyond that curre

Under constant attack, Ukraine’s arms makers take shelter in European factories

by Kollen Post
Ukraine’s wartime weapons technology looks bound for the West for the first time. "Our joint projects are the first real chances for our Ukrainian production abroad," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said while announcing a newly signed agreement with Denmark on July 4. "This concerns drones, and many other necessary forms of weapons." The deal "opens the path to the creation of Ukrainian defense production on the territory of Denmark," wrote Strategic Industries Minister Herman Smetanin
The launch a Vampire drone in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Feb. 2, 2024.

With Trump-Zelensky ‘mega-deal,’ Ukraine’s drone makers hope to flood the US

by Kollen Post
In an interview yesterday with the New York Post, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky floated a new pending “mega-deal” with U.S. President Donald Trump to sell Ukrainian drones to the American military. "The people of America need this technology, and you need to have it in your arsenal," Zelensky reportedly said. The deal has not actually been completed, and it’s unknown whether a formal text of it actually exists. Indeed, Zelensky’s advertising of this deal in a publication that is known

Analysis: Ahead of Trump's 'major' Russia announcement, what will happen next to Ukraine?

Amid ever-escalating aerial assaults, accelerating Russian advances in the east, and the weariness that comes with nearly 3.5 years of war, all eyes in Ukraine are once again focused upon one man — U.S. President Donald Trump. "I think I'll have a major statement to make on Russia on Monday," Trump said in an interview with NBC News on July 10, the latest development in a tortuously long and so far wholly ineffective U.S.-led peace process. Short of a massive injection of military aid, or crus

'We need to learn how to live without America' — Ukraine’s survival amid faltering US aid

by Kollen Post
Ukrainians breathed a sigh of relief of sorts this week after it was confirmed that U.S. President Donald Trump had ordered the continuation of shipments of critical military aid after a brief pause. The days-long hiccup alarmed a Ukraine beset with ever-escalating Russian air strikes and a dwindling supply of the means to stop them, and is just the latest instalment of a saga riven with uncertainty over Washington's willingness to give Ukraine what it needs to defend itself against Russia. A
Wreckage after Russian air strike on a residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine, on June 17, 2025.

'Major casualties among civilians' — US freeze on air defense missiles is terrible news for Ukraine

by Kollen Post
The halting of deliveries of air defense missiles from the U.S. will lead to“major casualties among civilians,” a deputy commander in Ukraine’s air defense told the Kyiv Independent. Politico reported on July 1 that the U.S. Defense Department (DOD) had halted shipments of some weapons previously promised to Kyiv out of concerns over the size of U.S. stockpiles, citing sources familiar with the matter. The aid in question included several pieces of U.S. weaponry that have been critical to Ukra
Interceptor drones, funded by the Prytula Foundation.

Ukraine’s new interceptor UAVs are starting to knock Russia’s long-range Shahed drones out of the sky

by Kollen Post
Russia’s Shahed drone swarms are pummeling Ukraine on a nightly basis, inflicting ever more death and destruction in cities that had managed to carve out some sense of normalcy amid wartime. Civilian alarm has grown. With traditional air defense stockpiles running low, the government is banking on newly created “interceptor-drones” to restore a baseline of public safety. “Ukraine is already using interceptors to shoot down Shaheds and is expanding their production,” President Volodymyr Zelensk
155mm artillery shell casings during manufacturing at the BAE Systems factory in United Kingdom, on Nov. 8, 2023.

‘It’s a race’ — UK’s largest ammo maker rebooting chemistry to break NATO’s dependence on explosive imports

by Kollen Post
Russia’s war in Ukraine has drained Western ammunition stocks. Despite years of claimed weapons ramp-ups, NATO’s arms manufacturing is still not refilling those stocks apace, let alone making it to Ukraine in needed mass. The West has come to recognize that these shortages are due to the offshoring of explosives production. But a flurry of new investment incentive schemes from NATO members into defense industries is not yielding results that compare with Russia’s alarming success at arming itse
Fire and smoke rise into the sky after an Israeli attack on the Shahran oil depot in Tehran, Iran, on June 15, 2025.

Russia pulls its scientists out of Iranian nuclear plant, as Israeli strikes threaten decades of collaboration

by Kollen Post
Israel’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities have alarmed none more than Russia, the country that first brought nuclear power to Iran in defiance of Western objections. We’re “millimeters from catastrophe,” said Kremlin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on June 18 in response to a bombing campaign that Israel launched against Iran on June 13. Decades of conflict with the West have united Iran and Russia, despite a cultural gulf between the two nations that dwarfs the Caspian Sea that physically di
155mm shells for the Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzer at the company’s facility in Unterlüß, Germany, on June 6, 2023.

Why can't the West match Russia's ammunition production?

by Kollen Post
Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect new details of BAE Systems' new chemical process that the company confirmed to the Kyiv Independent after initial publication. The West is failing to catch up to Russia's production of the most basic unit of war for the past half-millennium — gunpowder. The modern propellants and explosives that power war have largely been offshored. While Western manufacturers are churning out shell casings, they are short on the materials to fill them w