With Trump-Zelensky ‘mega-deal,’ Ukraine’s drone makers hope to flood the US
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 to be Trump’s favorite may be a means of wooing his U.S. counterpart into such a deal.
But an agreement to sell Ukrainian drones to the U.S. or exchange them for U.S. weapons would be a major step for both countries. Those involved in Ukraine’s drone industry are cheering it — albeit cautiously — as the start of a teardown of the two biggest geopolitical walls blocking their businesses globally: Ukraine’s export controls and the American defense’s reluctance to buy from abroad.
Despite mass Western interest in the Ukrainian drone industry, export controls have kept almost all of Ukraine’s wartime tech in-country. The new deal would represent a major rollback of unofficial but strict restrictions on the export of military hardware from the country.
For the U.S., such a deal would pose a rare breach in a notoriously territorial military procurement network. The U.S. Defense Department is by far the largest weapons purchaser in the world, but it also doesn’t like to buy foreign, and almost never from outside of NATO.
With a deal like this, "the U.S. gets effective, tested solutions with the necessary electronic-warfare resistance," said Maksym, who heads a first-person view and bomber drone maker called DCU and declined to give his last name for security reasons. "Ukrainian producers get investment and access to one of the biggest markets, which builds up development potential."
"The U.S. cannot compete with Ukraine in battlefield drones because of the deep separation between the combat commands and the defense industry in the U.S.."
In some sense, this is at least an admission by the Defense Department that some of Ukraine’s wartime drone industry may have surpassed U.S. competitors. Indeed, many of the most high-profile U.S. drone makers have fallen short repeatedly in Ukraine.
"They don’t have enough up-to-date battle experience," Viktor Lokotkov, head of marketing for reconnaissance drone maker Airlogix, told the Kyiv Independent.
"The U.S. cannot compete with Ukraine in battlefield drones because of the deep separation between the combat commands and the defense industry in the U.S.," Perry Boyle, head of MITS Capital, which invests in Ukrainian defense tech companies, told the Kyiv Independent. "Unlike Ukraine, the combat commands cannot directly procure or work on drones."
Given the U.S. Defense Department's tendency not to buy from producers outside of the country, this may result in firms setting up production inside the U.S.
The distance between combat command and industry, however, raises the question of whether Ukrainian producers can possibly make masses of the latest developments and ship them to the United States in bulk in short enough times that the final product remains at the cutting edge.
Maksym noted that one of the key benefits of Ukraine’s proximity to the battlefield is that they’ve made the drones easy to change, saying, "In fact, these are modular systems and you can adapt them quickly to whatever conditions you find yourself in."
He noted that many Ukrainian drones contain Chinese components, which would likely be one of the first "modules" to change if production would take off to sell to the U.S. While general compliance with intensive and often arcane U.S. defense procurement rules may be a new practice, "for Ukraine, this could be a stimulus to standardization, certification, and an entry to the global market."
Ukrainian production may ultimately have to relocate to the U.S., which Lokotkov says his firm is considering if Ukraine doesn’t bring down its export controls.
An issue in a potential mass sale abroad would be that the Zelensky administration’s domestic procurement processes have led to a series of scandals over appointing political allies, extensive kickbacks, and corruption.
But the biggest complication at the moment, according to Boyle, is that the deal is government-to-government. "Like the minerals deal, the devil is in the details, and this could take significant time for the bureaucrats to solidify the terms."
