Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency has contracted about 5.5 times as many drones of various types in recent months as in the same period of 2025. It is roughly 300% more over the year as a whole, the Defense Ministry said.

Drones are the weapons this war runs on, from short-range strikes to hits deep inside Russia, and Ukraine has raced to build and buy more of them while sparing its troops. The agency contracted for about $8 billion worth of drones in the first half of 2026 alone, double the amount for the same period last year.

The ministry wants to arm the force at every level, Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara stresses. Deep-strike drones hit targets far inside Russia, while middle-strike drones kill enemy drone crews and burn logistics and command posts, lowering the risk to Ukrainian soldiers.

“Technology and having enough of these systems raise combat effectiveness and at the same time reduce the risks for our soldiers,” Khmara said.

FPV drones lead the surge

The sharpest growth is in FPV drones, the cheap first-person-view quadcopters that do much of the killing on the front. Contracting for them in 2026 already exceeds the total for all of 2025 by 54%, and deliveries have risen almost 3.7 times, the ministry notes.

International support and the scaling of Ukraine’s own defense industry made the jump possible, Khmara adds. Much of the buying now runs through the DOT-Chain Defense marketplace, where units select what they need, and the agency handles contracts and logistics, cutting the average delivery time for in-stock items to 9 days.

Making supply predictable

The ministry is trying to make deliveries steadier, Khmara explains. It is aligning the front’s needs, purchase planning, and the production capacity of the Ukrainian industry, making supply more predictable.

Predictable contracting lets manufacturers build their production lines step by step, plan logistics and order components in advance, he says. The ministry frames the push as a larger order book for the domestic industry and a way to scale the solutions that work in combat.

Ukraine is canceling part of its planned military purchases and moving the money to other priorities. Ukraine's Defense Ministry has announced that it, together with the General Staff and the Logistics Forces Command, will free about $346 million by terminating some weapons contracts and dropping some planned purchases.

What the army planned to buy in 2024 and 2025 may no longer be suitable for the front, the ministry noted, because technology and tactics change quickly. The review comes four days after the Ukrainian government drew about $1.1 billion from the defense reserve to pay soldiers in October amid a looming economic crisis.

The ministry gives five reasons for the review: some weapons no longer match combat tasks, certain suppliers cannot build the planned volume, certain models have not been codified, partners already cover some needs, and cheaper means can perform specific jobs in larger numbers.

"For us, there is one criterion: does the item work for results in combat today. Every hryvnia released from irrelevant contracts must reach the troops as the weapons needed right now and in the right place," Col. Yurii Pohribnyi, commander of the Logistics Forces, says.

The procurement agency calls each producer

The General Staff set the final list of purchases for review, and the ministry forwarded the documents to the Defense Procurement Agency to implement the decision. For specific items, delivery volumes were adjusted rather than canceled, which the contracts allow when needs change.

Affected producers have been informed, and the agency is discussing each item with suppliers based on the status and payments of each contract. Artem Romaniuk, acting director of the agency, has explained that further steps on each contract will depend on the army's current needs and the contract terms. The list of weapons stays secret for security reasons.

Funds freed up by terminating contracts and canceling planned purchases will be redirected to the urgent needs of Ukraine’s Defense Forces.

Ukraine has turned ground robots into a frontline workhorse, and the state is now trying to buy them at scale through its first competitive, ministry-spec tender. Viktor Pavlov, an officer of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade's UGV battalion, laid out the risks of that model to Army Inform, the Defense Ministry's outlet, in an interview. Once a robot clears the military's technical requirements, price becomes the main criterion, Pavlov says. The order is split into lots, and no maker can take more than half a class. He warns the model may not tell a cheap, makeshift machine from one that actually survives at the front.

Robots now handle the war's deadliest chores—driving supplies through kill zones and reaching the wounded where people can't—and Ukraine has already contracted more than 22,000 for 2026. How the military buys them now shapes whether the push yields machines troops trust or a stockpile of cheap ones they don't.

From disposable drones to the next mass weapon

Aerial drones became disposable, mass-produced weapons years ago. Ground robots—the tracked and wheeled machines that haul supplies, pull out the wounded, and attack Russian positions—are only now reaching serial state supply. In August, the Defense Procurement Agency (DOT), the body that buys Ukraine's arms, opened its first competitive tenders for logistics and strike robots built to specs set by the Defense Ministry. Pavlov, founder of Ukraine's UGV School, calls it an experimental format that can work where market prices are inflated. Splitting the order into lots also gives smaller engineering teams a real chance, he said, because many large producers are already busy with state contracts.

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Why the lowest bid may beat the best robot

A tender rewards the cheapest product that formally meets the requirements, not the best one, Pavlov said. A thermal camera, for example, can be listed as desirable rather than mandatory, so a maker chasing the lowest price will most likely leave it off. On any given feature the machines diverge—suspension, cameras, comms channels, a winch—one has it, another doesn't, yet both can land in the same class.

The machines themselves are very different. One carries 250 kilograms, another up to 349, but both fall into the "200-plus" category. Unlike FPV drones, which share standard sizes and parts, ground robots have no common frame—Ukraine fields many local variants. Pavlov compared the choice to picking an iPhone over a cheaper Android: on paper the features match, but soldiers know which machine they can run and repair.

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He also fears the model punishes innovation. A company can spend 18 months and a 20-person team building a robot, then watch a rival copy it, skip the research costs, and undercut it. A design troops already know how to run and repair—like the Ratel—is a known quantity. An untested bargain can break down mid-mission with no spare parts.

A mixed system, not tenders alone

Price competition should be one tool, not the only one, Pavlov argued. New robots should first reach units through pilot buys, letting soldiers test them and say what works. Proven systems can then be contracted in bulk, with tenders saved for classes where the offers are truly comparable. Ukraine's robots are too varied, he said, and what units need can't always be squeezed onto a spec sheet.

Ukraine's defense technology cluster Brave1 has launched the development of anti-drone rifle rounds, significantly increasing the chances of hitting fast-moving aerial targets, the group said in a statement on June 30.

According to Brave1, the ammunition appears similar to standard rounds used in automatic rifles but features a specially designed warhead that increases the likelihood of shooting down FPV (first-person-view) drones or commercial quadcopters such as the DJI Mavic before they strike.

These types of drones are being used extensively on the battlefield by both Ukrainian and Russian forces. The cost-effective FPV drones have proven highly effective in destroying expensive military equipment.

The manufacturer has already codified the new rounds according to NATO standards, Brave1 said. The goal is to supply every infantry soldier with a magazine of specialized ammunition for use in case of aerial threats.

"These rounds that significantly improve the chances of hitting a moving target are a new development by Brave1," Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said.

"Our common goal is to ensure that every infantryman has a magazine of such ammunition and can equip his rifle with it in case of an air threat."

Ukraine continues to scale up its drone warfare capabilities. The Defense Ministry said on March 10 that it plans to purchase 4.5 million FPV drones in 2025 at a cost exceeding Hr 110 billion ($2.6 billion), with most of the funds allocated through the Defense Procurement Agency.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has set a goal of producing at least 30,000 long-range drones in 2025.

Tired of military aid delays, Ukraine has designed its own ballistic missile — and it’s already in mass-production

Ukraine announced on June 13 that its short-range Sapsan ballistic missile would go into mass production, a major development in Kyiv’s ongoing efforts to domestically produce the weapons it needs to fight Russia’s full-scale invasion. As Ukraine faces growing challenges in securing weapons from Western partners, and Russia continues launching

The Kyiv IndependentYuliia Taradiuk