• Drones, from combat to intelligence-gathering systems, have dominated the battlefield in Ukraine.
• Ukraine and Russia have boosted domestic drone production efforts to meet front-line needs.
• Kyiv now appears to be winning this race.

The stunning rise of drone warfare has pushed Ukraine and Russia to boost their respective domestic efforts to produce unmanned systems, kicking off a high-stakes race to out-manufacture the other.

Right now, Kyiv appears to be winning. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week that the country’s defense companies can now produce 4 million drones annually.

Speaking at the second International Defense Industries Forum in Kyiv, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine has already contracted to produce 1.5 million unmanned systems. He did not specify what kind of drones these would be.

By contrast, Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month that Moscow intended to ramp up drone production tenfold to around 1.4 million a year, noticeably less than its neighbor.

Drones have dominated the battlefield in Ukraine, with both sides using them for combat and intelligence-gathering purposes. Although more traditional military drones are active. First-person view (FPV) drones have become particularly prominent, proving to be cheap and effective ways to deliver precision strikes on troops and vehicles.

The demand for more unmanned systems has pushed Ukraine and Russia to increase their domestic drone output to keep up with battlefield requirements — setting the stage for an unprecedented arms race.

Ukraine has set ambitious production goals, especially for the decidedly valuable FPV drones, but officials say it will exceed them. Kyiv has also built up an arsenal of homemade naval drones, which it has used to wreak havoc on Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet, and long-range attack drones, which it uses to strike key military and energy facilities deep inside Russia.

Ukraine’s increased drone output has come amid broader efforts to scale up its defense-industrial base. Kyiv went from almost no weapons production before the war to producing new munitions at lightning speed.

“While years ago, the Ukrainian defense industry unfortunately looked helpless, today it is an industry that is on its way to leadership, at least in Europe,” Zelenskyy said Tuesday. “Today, these are industries that Ukraine can once again be rightfully proud of.”

Conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank that has been closely following the war in Ukraine, said this week that Kyiv’s ongoing efforts to grow its domestic military production would eventually allow the country to reduce its reliance on Western military support.

But, the analysts wrote in a Wednesday assessment, Kyiv “still requires considerable Western assistance for the next several years in order to defend against Russian aggression and liberate strategically vital areas that Russian forces currently occupy.”

Western countries have provided well over $100 billion in military and security aid for Ukraine. The US is the single biggest supplier of weaponry, having provided nearly $60 billion worth of security assistance since the start of the war.