Combat testing and price assessment are carried out by the military, and feedback is then delivered. Now it takes just six weeks to secure a deal, when it once took years. “We’ve signed more contracts with Ukrainian drone manufacturers in the past two months than we did all of past year,” says Fedorov. Fedorov has created incentives: there are fewer custom checks and restrictions, red tape has been cut and companies can make a 25 percent profit on any drones they sell. Now there are forty firms making drones directly for the defense ministry, with more on the way. When Vladimir Putin invaded last February, only seven companies in Ukraine supplied drones to the army, in large part because many others had been driven abroad by high taxes and regulations.

There are no official numbers, but some estimates have said Ukraine is losing 10,000 a month. The objective is to make drones more quickly than Russia can shoot them down. “We would like drone assault companies in each brigade.” Fedorov says six more will be created soon. This unprecedented collaboration of private enterprise and the national military has so far seen twelve drone assault companies created, with about sixty-five soldiers apiece. His “Army of Drones” program has been designed to encourage Ukrainian companies to make thousands of drones and train a similarly large number of operators. The aim was to out-produce and out-innovate the Kremlin.Īt thirty-two, Fedorov is now a veteran. He hoped to incentivize and energize both the voluntary and private sectors. Fedorov’s remit was to bypass a slow-moving and often fraud-addled civil service. Once the war intensified, the brief soon expanded to defense procurement. At first, the idea was to move common government services onto an app called Diia. Soon after his election, President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the then twenty-eight-year-old Fedorov to run a new ministry aimed at turning Ukraine into a digital country (or, as he put it, a “paperless state”).

Russia has drones too - many more of them - and is adept at jamming and downing Ukraine’s fleet. To reclaim occupied land, Ukrainian troops need to remove miles of landmines, and can do so only if kept safe by swarms of drones that fly ahead, searching for the enemy. It has become crucial to the counteroffensive. We meet at the Ministry of Digital Transformation, which he runs in Kyiv. “We will end this war with drones,” says Mykhailo Fedorov, deputy prime minister of Ukraine.

How do you aim in world of warships