Ukraine focuses on the production of drones, since the cost of destroying the enemy with drones is much lower than with other weapons.
The formula for the destruction of the Russian invaders
Oleksandr Kamyshin, Minister of Strategic Industries, explained to TIME journalist Simon Shuster why Ukraine is fixated on the production of drones.
It sounds boring, but there is a formula: the price of one destruction [of the occupier]. We apply it to every type of weapon that is produced in Ukraine. One Stugna projectile, for example, kills three [Russians] on average. So, the price of one murder is $4,613. The price of a murder using an FPV drone is $1,650. The conclusion is simple: it is necessary to put as much money as possible into the production of drones.
Production of drones in Ukraine
TIME writes that last year, Ukraine invested about a billion dollars in its drone program, and this figure will double in 2024.
Currently, in Ukraine, approximately two hundred companies produce drones for the military, ranging from startups to large Soviet-era enterprises.
In the summer of 2016, one of the leading Ukrainian aerospace companies presented an unmanned aerial vehicle called "Gorlytsia", which had a range of about 100 kilometres and could handle reconnaissance and targeting.
However, at the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022, there was only a prototype of these drones in Ukraine.
It wasn't until the second year of the invasion that they were re-engineered to fly much longer distances and put into mass production. Since then, they have been used to strike targets deep inside Russian territory.
