Enough to Block Out The Sun: Where Are Ukrainian Drones Coming From?

The war in Ukraine has repeatedly subverted expectations on what modern conventional warfare is supposed to look like. World War I machine guns guard trenches while glide bombs fly over them to strike artillery batteries dug in static positions. Unmanned land vehicles are employed to unfold barbed wire coils to slow down dismounted infantry advances. 155 and 152 artillery shells are in demand as much as infantry fighting vehicles and Patriot anti-air interceptors. The war in Ukraine is not World War I, World War II, or Desert Storm but rather a new reality where combatants innovate and employ every means at their disposal to survive. To achieve this goal, they do not think twice about cannibalising elements from previous conflicts, and in fact, much of what we see in Ukraine is not new, although used in an uncanny blend. One novelty has been drones. Not that the unmanned systems deployed are particularly innovative or cutting edge, per se. Drones have been the next revolutionary kit for the past twenty years, and the hype regarding this technology is surpassed only by zeal in debunking its merits. What is truly revolutionary is the sheer mass of the systems employed. The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war has been overenthusiastically characterised as a “Drone War”, and the Azeri Armed Forces had less than one thousand drones available. Conversely, yearly drone production in Ukraine can reach up to 4 million, according to President Zelensky. This analysis will first look at how important drones are for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and then shift focus to the characteristics of the systems employed in the conflict, and to the manufacturing capabilities in the PRC.

Precise Mass Warfare or poor man's artillery?

Notwithstanding what the flood of shaky footage of armoured vehicles being hit by drones might suggest, unmanned systems’ utility in Ukraine goes well beyond kinetic strikes. RUSI analysts Watling and Raynolds have observed the use of drones for “ground close combat, fires, engineering, reconnaissance, logistics and resupply, medical support and air defence”. Drones take on tasks such as mine clearing and laying, there are some experiments in casualty evacuation through unmanned ground systems, and they deliver ammunitions and rations to forward positions. Arguably, the most important contribution drones give to the conflict is in the field of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). The pervasive use of drones, which are involved in practically all ISR-related missions, has made the first 3 kilometres from the line of contact transparent, which means that if there is movement in this zone, it will be detected. Moreover, ISR drone use is distributed along different echelons, with both battalions and individual companies conducting ISR operations and always maintaining multiple drones in the air.

Naturally, the importance of drones for fire tasks cannot be understated. According to Ukrainian officials, drones are responsible for two-thirds of Russian equipment losses. This statistic cannot be dismissed by skeptics of the systems. However, it must be underlined that the relevance of drones in this conflict is mainly due to the scarcity of better and more traditional armament, especially artillery shells such as the NATO 155mm and the Eastern 152mm. Although Ukrainian officers state that there are powerful synergies to be found by employing both drones and artillery (for example, using a drone to immobilise an armoured vehicle and artillery shells to finish it off), in many cases, drones are used as a less effective substitute for artillery. In other words, instead of being a futuristic weapon at the cutting edge of technology, drones for fires tasks function as a “poor-man” artillery, especially when electronic warfare lowers their rate of success at reaching the target to less than 40%.

However, their cheapness and attritability (an ugly military neologism for substitutability) is exactly their most relevant quality. One could argue that Ukraine would be better off with more artillery shells rather than such a multitude of drones, but the fact of the matter is that it is not able to acquire enough artillery shells and instead can procure an enormous number of drones.   Europe, with an aggregate GDP of 18.35$ trillion, is set to produce two million 155mm artillery shells in 2025. Ukraine, whose GDP in 2021 was less than 200$ billion and is currently ravaged by war, can produce 4 million drones. Now, as we have seen, drones are not all used for fire tasks, they are less effective than artillery ammunition, and Ukrainians are more invested in defence procurement than Europeans, but it is still impressive that for every European shell, Ukraine could produce two drones. This industrial achievement has brought some analysts, like Brose, to push for a pivot in defence procurement, shifting the focus from exquisite, and therefore few, systems to cheap, and therefore many, unmanned systems. And Horowitz see in the cheapness of drones a new paradigm, called precise mass, in which advancement in surveillance and reconnaissance technology (partly thanks to drones themselves) make enemy target finding, fixing, and tracking more pervasive and accurate on the battlefield, while the cost of precision guided ammunitions, once a prerogative of extremely advanced militaries, have dramatically decreased. If you think of a drone carrying an explosive as a precision-guided munition, the cost went from 70.000$ to 100.000$ for a 155mm M982 Excalibur shell (an artillery ammunition with a GPS-guided system) to less than 1000$ for a FPV drone. Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, former Commander in Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, firmly believes in the importance of cheap drones, which make “attrition warfare effective and affordable at scale” and the Ukrainian Armed Forces is the first in creating a branch dedicated solely to unmanned systems, under the name of Unmanned Systems Force.

How can Ukraine do it? An unlikely (and unreliable) “partner”

There is a great variety of drones employed in Ukraine, with different specifications based on their mission. The website DefenseArchive collects a non-exhaustive list of military drones used in the conflict. Out of the 56 types considered, 30 are produced in Ukraine, while the remaining are imported (most of the time in the form of donations) from the US, EU, UK, Türkiye, and in one case, Hong Kong. The most prominent kind of drone is the one employed for portable ISR: weighing between 2 and 15 kg, they fly at low speed, usually less than 85 km/h, with a range not greater than 80 km. Examples of this kind of drone are the Ukrainian Mara-2D and Valkyrie, the Danish RQ-35 Heidrun, the Turkish Bayraktar Mini, and the German Vector. This type of drone can be used both to surveil the area close to the line of contact and to feed directed information to artillery batteries to strike predetermined targets 20 to 40 km deep into the enemy positions. Rudimentary drone countermeasures and electronic warfare make the rate of attrition of this kind of drone extremely high. A second kind of systems are loitering munitions, which are comparable to the first kind for dimension and range, but carry additional weight due to their explosive payload, usually around 3 kg and are in some cases faster, reaching up to 150 km/h. Examples of this kind are the Ukrainian RAM-2, Bulava, and Stick M12, and the American Switchblade 600 and Altius-600. This kind of drone is meant to strike targets close to the line of contact and serve a tactical value. The third kind are the one-way attack drones (or kamikaze) and differ greatly from the first two kinds. In fact, they are bigger, heavier (over 100kg in most cases) and have much greater range, up to 1000 km. That is because they serve primarily a strategic purpose, striking Russian infrastructure, such as gas refineries, and symbolic targets deep into Russian territory. Examples of this last kind are mainly Ukrainian, like the Lyutty, the UJ-Bober 16, and the UJ-25 Skyline.

Notwithstanding the multitude of drones already mentioned, they do not constitute the majority of the drones procured by Ukraine. In 2024, Ukraine spent UAH 15.4 billion (370$ million) in drone procurement, for 1.6 million systems. Only UAH 3.5 billion (around 23% of the total procurement) was spent in the procurement of the military drones abovementioned. Instead, 64% of the total was spent to procure DJI Mavic drones, a family of commercial quadcopters which cost between 500 and 2000$ per unit. These quadcopters have a range of up to 20km and they weigh less than 1 kg. They have not been designed for military purposes, nor a military environment, but their cheapness and attritability make them “good enough” in the Ukrainian conflict for ISR tasks and as improvised loitering munitions, by sticking grenades or other explosives to them and launching them against the enemy. The remaining portion of the drone procurement budget is taken up by other less successful First-Person View (FPV) drones, such as those by Autel Robotics. Beyond their cheapness, the fundamental characteristic of these FPVs is that they are Chinese. In fact, much of the domestically produced drones in Ukraine is produced with components imported from China as well. This state of affairs brings about a paradox. In this conflict, the Russian Federation and the PRC are bound in a “no-limits” partnership (a term coined just a couple of weeks before the Russian invasion). Russia is dependent on the PRC for dual-use technology necessary for its war effort and to substitute part of the European energy exports it has lost since 2022. For its part, China looks at the situation in Ukraine with interest and apprehension, seeing many similarities with a possible future conflict over Taiwan. Nevertheless, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have an enormous amount of relevant equipment procured through China. Beyond paradoxical, this is a vulnerability for Ukraine, which has already suffered due to its dependence on China. In 2023, the PRC banned the export to Ukraine and Russia of long-range drones, and in 2024 introduced export restrictions on some drone components. Still, it is hard to argue that China is doing everything in its power to stop the flow of drones to Ukraine, which is probably a sign of its transactional approach to International Relations, for which the partnership with Russia is not enough to justify damaging the commercial prospect of one of its firm in a sector it considers strategic (especially when 60% DJI revenues comes from Ukraine).

Ukraine, however, does not have a valid alternative to relying on China for its drone needs. 90% of the world's drone production is concentrated in China, and more specifically, in the city of Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a technological hub, often referred to as the “Silicon Valley of China” in the Guangdong region, right above Hong Kong. Through grants and subsidies, the Municipal Government of Shenzhen made the city an economic cluster, where the industrial base is integrated and drone companies like DJI can procure components at a fraction of the cost. In turn, drone technology is much more pervasive in the city than anywhere else, with drone food delivery a normal aspect of everyday life. While Western countries, the US foremost, procure their military drones through domestic companies, the lack of a strong commercial basis makes their equipment incredibly more expensive than systems produced with Chinese components: while a Switchblade 600, produced by the American company AeroVironment, costs more than 80.000$, a similar, although probably less effective, loitering munitions produced by Ukraine using Chinese parts, such as a Dart, costs around 1.200$. A state-of-the-art Western system can arguably be more effective than one of these Jury-rigged platforms built in the middle of a conflict, but can it be more effective than 80 of them? Without a solid commercial drone base, what is now an uncomfortable vulnerability for Ukraine can become a fatal weakness for the West in the future.

Conclusion

Drones in Ukraine are important, not because they represent a new frontier of military technology, but because they are cheap and easily replaceable. They carry out fundamental tasks in the conflict, the most important being ISR-related, but at the same time fires missions cannot be dismissed, seeing the impact they are having on casualties. Drones' importance and cheapness have inflated the number of systems in use, with millions of platforms being procured by both parties every year. The industrial engine behind such a multitude of unmanned systems is China, which holds a practical monopoly of commercial drones. The prevalence of the PRC is a vulnerability for both Ukraine and its Western partners, and it must be addressed by recognising drone production as a strategic industry that Europe and the US must develop as soon as possible.