Ukraine's emerging role as a defence technology exporter

Saturday 14 February 2026

Ukraine’s emerging defence technology export sector is not being built in peacetime boardrooms. She is building it under air-raid sirens, inside workshops that move when the front line moves and inside laboratories that are, in truth, trenches with soldering irons. That origin story matters, because it explains both the sector’s strengths and its tensions: speed over perfection, iteration over grand design, and an instinct for survivability that is hard to teach in any other way.

For much of the post-Soviet period, Ukraine’s defence industry was spoken of in the language of inheritance. She had Soviet-era plants, Soviet-era standards, and Soviet-era bureaucracies. Since 2022, however, she has increasingly been spoken of in the language of invention. Not because she has suddenly become a wonderland of effortless innovation, but because the war has punished every lazy assumption. Electronic warfare improved, drones multiplied, artillery barrels wore out, and anything that could not be adapted quickly became irrelevant quickly. Europe has been watching, not with romanticism, but with professional interest.

That professional interest is now turning into commerce and industrial replication. Reuters reported on 9 February 2026 that Ukraine is preparing to open her weapons exports and to establish ten export centres across Europe, with drones among the most prominent products and with production of Ukrainian drone designs already under way in the United Kingdom and expected to start in Germany.  The significance is not simply that Ukraine wants to export. It is that she is designing a European-facing architecture for export, as though she were already a mature defence supplier, rather than a recipient of emergency aid.

The logic is straightforward. Ukraine has built a vast network of private and semi-private manufacturers during the war, many of them specialising in drones, counter-drone measures, electronic warfare and the wiring, software and materials that make those systems work. Europe’s armed forces meanwhile have discovered that the war’s centre of gravity is often found in the air at low altitude: cheap unmanned aircraft, survivable communications and rapid adaptation to jamming. The old comfort of assuming air superiority at will has weakened. So has the assumption that innovation arrives in multi-year procurement cycles.

Exports are therefore not merely a revenue stream. They are a strategic argument. Ukraine is effectively saying: we have learned lessons at scale, with blood as the tuition fee, and we can sell you those lessons in hardware, software, training and production methods. That is an uncomfortable proposition for some European audiences, because it implies that the continent’s most valuable defence laboratory is a country at war. Yet it is also difficult to dismiss, because much of Europe’s modernisation agenda now runs through drones, counter-drones and electronic warfare, precisely the areas in which Ukraine has been forced to live on the edge of adaptation.

The most interesting development is that export is not being framed only as crates leaving Ukrainian borders. It is increasingly being framed as designs, intellectual property and production lines migrating into Europe, where they can be scaled, insured, financed and supplied more easily.

Germany has become an emblem of this approach. In December 2025 a German-Ukrainian initiative was announced under which Ukrainian-designed, battlefield-proven drones would be produced on an industrial scale in Germany through a joint venture involving Quantum Systems and a Ukrainian partner, Frontline Industries. This is more than a factory story. It is a supply chain story. Producing in Germany offers access to components, manufacturing discipline, export compliance infrastructure and investor confidence that are harder to secure in a country under missile attack. It also offers something subtler: a pathway for Ukrainian design standards to become normalised inside European defence procurement.

The United Kingdom appears to have taken a parallel route. Reuters’ reporting indicates that production of Ukrainian drone designs is already taking place there. The public details remain limited, but the direction is clear: Ukraine’s design talent is being paired with Western industrial capacity, and the result is a product that can be delivered both to Ukraine’s own armed forces and, increasingly, to other buyers.

Czechia offers another window into the same trend: co-production and industrial shelter. Reporting in 2024 and 2025 described serial production of Ukrainian reconnaissance and strike drone types in the Czech Republic for use by Ukraine. Even allowing for the fog that surrounds defence reporting during wartime, the pattern is consistent across multiple sources: Ukrainian designs are not confined to Ukrainian soil. They are being reproduced where there is relative safety, stable electricity, ready access to parts and easier logistics into European markets.

This is what a wartime export sector looks like when it grows up early. It does not begin with glossy catalogues. It begins with trusted relationships, shared urgency and a willingness to treat production as a network rather than a single site.

One should be cautious, however, about imagining that Ukraine’s emerging export sector is simply a triumphal march from garage workshop to multinational supplier. There are constraints—some technical, some legal, some moral.

First, export control. Ukraine is fighting for her survival. Governments are understandably reluctant to allow the sale abroad of systems that are urgently needed at home. Reuters’ report reflects a deliberate effort by Kyiv to create export centres and mechanisms that can unlock revenue while still prioritising domestic needs. In practice this becomes an exercise in triage: what can be exported without weakening the front line, and what export revenue can be reinvested in scaling production for Ukraine’s own armed forces?

Secondly, intellectual property and security. A design that works on the battlefield is valuable not only to allies but also to adversaries. The more widely it is exported, the more likely it is to be captured, reverse-engineered and countered. That does not mean export should not happen. It means the export sector will increasingly revolve around controlled partnerships—co-production, licensing, and joint ventures—rather than anonymous sales to whoever pays.

Thirdly, standardisation. Ukraine’s wartime manufacturing culture prizes speed and improvisation. That culture produces brilliance, but it also produces variation. European militaries, by contrast, often demand stable specifications, documentation and predictable maintenance. The export sector must therefore translate Ukraine’s fast iteration into Europe’s slower procurement language without losing the very agility that makes Ukrainian systems attractive.

This is where institutions and frameworks start to matter. European analysis in 2024 already emphasised that Ukraine’s defence industrial reform and European support mechanisms would be central to sustained production. Joint ventures between Ukrainian state industry and major European companies illustrate the same trend: partnership structures designed to make cooperation legible to Western investors, auditors and ministries. Even where a specific partnership is not about exports, it signals a wider shift: Ukraine is integrating into the European defence industrial landscape, not as a subordinate workshop but as a source of designs and operational experience.

There is also a political dimension that should not be underestimated. When Ukrainian designs are manufactured in European factories, Europe becomes materially invested in Ukraine’s continued technological edge. That investment is not merely sentimental solidarity. It is payrolls, machinery, export licences and local supply contracts. It is industrial policy. That is why Ukrainian export centres in Europe, and European manufacturing of Ukrainian designs, are not only commercial initiatives but also diplomatic ones. 

What, then, does Ukraine’s export offering actually look like?

It is tempting to answer: drones. That is largely true, but insufficient. The export sector is best understood as a package of capabilities that revolve around unmanned systems.

• Aerial drones across multiple categories: reconnaissance platforms, strike drones, interceptor drones and systems adapted to resist jamming.

  
  

• Maritime unmanned systems: a domain in which Ukraine has demonstrated ingenuity and operational daring, attracting interest well beyond her region.

  
  

• Electronic warfare and counter-electronic warfare: not always visible in promotional material, but central to whether any unmanned system survives for more than minutes.

  
  

• The production method itself: rapid design loops driven by immediate feedback from soldiers, with prototypes becoming products in weeks rather than years.

This emphasis on unmanned systems is not a marketing fad. It reflects what the war has revealed about industrial sustainability. A drone that costs thousands rather than millions can be produced in larger numbers, replaced quickly, and improved continually. Export customers, especially smaller European states, are taking note. Reporting from early 2026 describes even small European Union members scaling drone manufacturing and integrating Ukraine’s experience into their own defence ambitions. That broader European shift creates a receptive market for Ukrainian designs, provided they can be supplied reliably and supported properly.

Yet the export sector’s long-term health will depend on whether it can move beyond the romance of battlefield success into the dull necessities of global trade: warranties, training packages, spare parts, software update regimes, and legal accountability for where systems end up. Ukraine’s leadership appears to understand this, hence the talk of export centres across Europe and the explicit positioning of wartime-developed technology as a European security asset. 

There is a further question, more sensitive but unavoidable: will Ukraine’s export sector be judged morally as well as technically?

For Ukraine, export is framed as survival: money to fund domestic production and a way to ensure she is not forever dependent on donations. For European buyers it can be framed as prudence: buying proven systems in a dangerous world. For critics, it may be framed as the normalisation of war as an innovation engine. That critique will not vanish. The best answer to it is transparency and restraint: export in ways that strengthen legitimate defence, avoid proliferation to reckless actors, and ensure revenue supports Ukraine’s security rather than private corruption.

If Ukraine succeeds, she may end up doing something rare. She may turn the grim lessons of her war into a durable European industrial role—supplying designs and operational knowledge, while European factories provide scale and stability. Germany and the United Kingdom, with reported production of Ukrainian drone designs, already point in that direction. Czech production lines associated with Ukrainian drone types suggest that the model can spread. The export centres Ukraine says she will open across Europe in 2026 indicate that Kyiv intends to institutionalise the entire process. 

The deeper significance is that this is not simply Ukraine joining a market. It is Ukraine reshaping what Europe thinks the market is for. In the twentieth century, the continent’s defence industry often sold deterrence in the form of heavy platforms and long procurement cycles. In the twenty-first, Ukraine is offering a different product: adaptability—systems that change as fast as the threat changes.

That is a harsh gift. It arrives wrapped in the history of cities bombed, families displaced, and soldiers who have had to learn quickly or die. But it is also a gift that Europe, if she is honest, cannot afford to ignore.