The Pentagon has awarded contracts to two Ukrainian companies that produce long-range drones, offering to test their products as part of a new long-term development project. Western officials have suggested the war in Ukraine presents opportunities to battle-test NATO weapons systems against Russian forces.
On Friday, the US Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) announced deals with four firms to produce one-way, long-range drones to be tested by the US military. Two of the contracts went to unnamed Ukrainian companies that manufacture unmanned aerial vehicles.
According to a DIU press release, the program, dubbed Project Artemis, seeks to produce “ground-launched, affordable one-way UAS [unmanned aircraft system] platforms that operate at ranges from 50-300 km+, launch quickly and expeditiously, navigate at low altitudes, carry a variety of payloads, are rapidly updatable and upgradable, and functional in disrupted, disconnected, intermittent and low-bandwidth and Global Navigation Satellite System denied environments.”
The involvement of two Ukrainian firms comes after Kiev increased long-range drone strikes on Russian territory. Last week, its forces targeted Russia with more than 300 drones, the largest such attack since the conflict began in 2022.
Washington and its NATO allies have viewed Ukraine as an opportunity to battlefield test its weapons and warfighting strategies against Russia. In 2023, a Western official explained to CNN that Ukraine was “absolutely a weapons lab in every sense because none of this equipment has ever actually been used in a war between two industrially developed nations. This is real-world battle testing.”
In many cases, Kiev has been the first nation to use Western arms against Russia in modern warfare, and has leveraged that position to sell NATO members on continuing to supply weapons to Ukraine. The country’s defense minister at the time, Oleksiy Reznikov, explained to the Financial Times in 2023 that Kiev’s Western allies “can actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if they need to be upgraded.”
“For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground,” he added.
