Ukraine voluntarily gave up the interceptor drone market to the US: what the hell?

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Let’s speak pragmatically, because emotions in the defense business do not work. While we continue to tell the world about our uniqueness and invaluable combat experience, global players simply make money and seize geopolitical influence. The news about the Pentagon’s deployment of 10,000 Merops interceptor drones in the Middle East is not just another press release. It is a verdict on our state inefficiency.

We are once again in a paradigm where we are on our own. The situation in the Middle East has exposed the harsh mathematics of modern warfare: shooting down an Iranian Shahed with a $4 million Patriot missile is a path to economic suicide. The Americans understood this instantly. Their solution? The $15,000 Merops drone, which was undergoing a “run-in” at our training ground yesterday. They collected data, trained their neural networks on our mistakes and blood, scaled up production, and are now covering the needs of an entire region.

And what are we doing at this time? We’re playing the classic “dog in the hay.”

We have Sting-II, ODIN, P1-Sun – machines that are many times cheaper (1–2 thousand dollars) and often technologically superior to American counterparts. These are not beautiful presentations, these are equipment that knocks down real targets every day. We had a queue of buyers from the Persian Gulf countries. But instead of capturing this market, becoming a global player and flooding our economy with export money, the state turned on the usual mode: ban, regulate, scare with criminal cases.

The logic of our officials is deadly in its primitiveness. But in the real world, regulatory cases and market management work differently. The defense business does not wait for someone to spend a long and tedious time figuring out the rules of the game. Whoever offered a ready-made solution the fastest won the contract. While our law enforcement agencies and customs create artificial barriers, considering manufacturers as cash cows or potential traitors, the American military-industrial complex simply takes our money.

The worst thing about this story is that we are losing not only budgets. We are losing standardization. When allied armies learn to operate American drones under the guidance of NATO instructors, they will never switch to Ukrainian systems again. Instead of making our weapons a global standard, we are turning into a free testing ground. Into consumables for foreign corporations.

Strategic miscalculations at the state level

Absolute ban instead of flexible regulation: A complete ban on arms exports is a primitive solution that has cut off Ukrainian manufacturers from billion-dollar markets. Instead of developing a mechanism for quotas, controlled exports of surpluses (what the state is physically or financially unable to buy back on its own), or taxation of export contracts to directly finance the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the state simply closed the door.

The state as a monopolist and a brake: the government has taken on the role of the sole customer, but has failed to provide either stable financing or transparent rules of the game. Manufacturers are forced to wait for months for contracts, going through circles of bureaucratic hell, while their Western competitors (such as the Merops developers) get the green light to deploy thousands of units in a matter of days.

Lack of global vision: we continue to think in terms of local survival, not global expansion. The world quickly realized that the future lies in cheap AI interceptors. Our engineers have proven this in practice, but the state has failed to turn this engineering triumph into an infrastructural and economic achievement. We have given up the technological initiative.

Presumption of business guilt: instead of partnership with the defense sector, we see constant pressure from law enforcement and fiscal authorities. When a manufacturer fears that they will be searched for trying to enter the international market or optimize production, there can be no question of any scaling.

What is the fault of Zelensky and his team?

The political and managerial responsibility for this missed opportunity lies squarely with the country’s top leadership for several reasons:

Manual management and fear of losing control: a system has been built where any strategic decision is limited to a narrow circle of loyal individuals. This team is panicking about decentralization and the strengthening of private capital in the defense sector. Independent, financially powerful technology businesses are often perceived not as a pillar of the state, but as a potential threat to the monopoly of power.

The priority of PR over pragmatism: it is much easier to record loud appeals asking for another Patriot battery than to build a complex, transparent, and effective regulatory framework that would allow Ukrainian businesses to independently earn money on global markets and reinvest it in the country’s defense.

Personnel and institutional blindness: appointing people to key positions in the defense and economic blocs who have no experience in building complex infrastructure or industrial systems. When the system is managed by executors without strategic thinking, their only management tool remains prohibition.

Instead of conclusions

When the Pechersk Hills finally realized that the market was lost, and billion-dollar contracts went to California, Kyiv tried to play its favorite game. Instead of selling technology, we decided to offer “help” – to send our specialists to share their experience in shooting down “Shaheeds”. They said, if you don’t buy our drones, then at least take our expertise.

The response was a demonstrative public slap in the face. Donald Trump stated directly, without any diplomatic curtseys, that the US does not need help in protecting itself from drones, and Zelensky is “the last person he would turn to” on this issue. This is not just rudeness or personal hostility on the part of the American leader. This is a cold, cruel statement of our new status on the international stage. In the world of pragmatic capital, they respect subject players. They respect those who come with a finished product, knock out joint ventures, bargain hard for market share, and defend their national business.

And those who sit on external subsidies for years, artificially block their own producers with criminal cases and customs barriers, and then run after them to offer free “advice” when contracts have long been signed with others… Well, they simply throw them out the door. And they do it as publicly as possible so that others understand who is who in this food chain.

We had every chance to become a key player in the Middle East security market. Instead, we chose the role of a beggar who is being shown his place.

There is still a window of opportunity in Japan, the Pacific Rim, and Africa. But unless we change our management strategy, unless we stop stifling our own innovation with bureaucracy, we will ultimately become a nation that knows how to survive but is completely incapable of capitalizing on its achievements.

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