Imagine a group of ordinary-looking apartment blocks in Kyiv, Ukraine, with a secret drone-making operation hidden beneath their streets. This is the world of Ukraine’s DIY drone-makers, who churn out hundreds of attack drones every month to aid the country’s war effort.
- Apart from the ones made by professional companies, most drones in Ukraine are handmade by volunteers, often with limited technical expertise.
- Many of these drones are equipped with a high-explosive payload, referred to as “candy,” and are flown into combat by operators wearing goggles with portable screens strapped around their heads.
- These drones are used to destroy enemy targets, including vehicles, trenches, personnel, and even tanks.
Andrii Yukhno, the supervisor of the Kyiv drone-making operation, is a perfect example of the transformation. Before the war, he earned his living as a barista in a coffee shop. However, after the invasion, he became a full-time volunteer in one of the many DIY weapons factories arming the fighters on Ukraine’s front lines.
“In the beginning, I was delivering food and medicine to people in Kyiv, anything to help,” he says. “But then I moved on to bigger and bigger things.”
Yukhno took online drone-making classes and started making first-person view (FPV) drones in this basement apartment. These drones are manually piloted unmanned aerial vehicles, and at the front lines, they are equipped with a high-explosive payload.
“But then I moved on to bigger and bigger things,”
Andrii praises the work of his trainee, Khrystyna Pashchenko, who arrived a couple of weeks ago. She is now soldering the engines to the motherboard.
- Pashchenko is 35 years old and has a background in cross-stitch.
- She left her job as a manager in a company that helped businesses appear higher in internet searches.
- She earns nothing now as a volunteer, but says that when the war started, her old work no longer felt meaningful.
- She finds motivation in helping the war effort and receiving videos from the front lines.
The war in Ukraine is now largely being fought with drones, with more than half the destruction on the front line caused by FPV drones, according to the Ukrainian general staff. Ukraine is at the cutting edge of drone innovation but lags behind Russia in drone production, experts say.
Necessity has transformed this country into a nation of drone-makers, who churn them out from factory assembly lines and mom-and-pop operations like the one in the basement apartment in Kyiv.
- Yukhno knows of at least 15 like his in Kyiv alone.
- The DIY drone-makers in Ukraine are producing hundreds of drones every month.
- These drones are equipped with a high-explosive payload, referred to as “candy,” and are flown into combat by operators wearing goggles with portable screens strapped around their heads.
A 30-minute drive away from the improvised weapons workshop, Oleksii Babenko is testing one of his company’s new drones in a field surrounded by forest on the outskirts of Kyiv. Babenko is the CEO of one of Ukraine’s most successful drone-making companies, Vyriy.
Babenko says that’s important at a time when Ukraine has to increasingly rely on itself. “From the start of this war, every time Ukraine needs something, we have to ask other nations for it over and over again,” he says.
- Babenko’s company is now producing drones made entirely of Ukrainian-sourced parts.
- The company recently reached a milestone: it is now turning out drones made entirely of Ukrainian-sourced parts.
- Ukraine made this breakthrough in 2023, but Russia quickly caught up.
Oleksandr Kamyshin, an advisor to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on strategic affairs, estimates that Russia is, most of the time, several months behind Ukraine in drone innovation. However, he says the Russians have much bigger production capabilities.
“Once you’ve got a technology, the other side tries to counter this technology,” he tells NPR. “And then you have to find another solution and the other side tries to counter that. Within the war is a constant war of innovations and technologies.”
Kamyshin says Ukraine is capable of producing up to 5 million FPV drones per year and has more than 150 manufacturers that can produce up to 100,000 drones per month.
Volunteers have left their fields of expertise for now to make drones. Oleh Halaidych, a biophysicist with a Ph.D. in the study of stem cells, says making drones is probably the quickest and most impactful way of helping Ukraine.
“I think we are all motivated because we see that this is a cheap and accessible way to make weapons,” he says. “They kill the enemy and destroy his armored vehicles.”
Halaidych says the war has made many people who work in culture or the arts and sciences realize that it’s a time to pursue different options.
“Science is slow,” he says.
