Ukraine has rapidly emerged as a global leader in unmanned warfare, reshaping how modern battles are fought on land, at sea and in the air. Speaking on TVP World’s Eastern Express, Taras Kuzio, a professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, said Ukraine’s technological edge is rooted in both historical legacy and wartime necessity. “Firstly, you have Ukraine inheriting its expertise from the Soviet Union and from the post-Soviet era,” Kuzio said, noting a “great tradition of engineering” and the fact that “40% of Ukraine’s economy was the military sector” during Soviet times. That legacy, he added, has been supercharged by war: “You are fighting an existential war since 2022. You needed to innovate very quickly on the battlefield.” He argued that Ukraine’s dominance in drone warfare is also structural. “Ukraine has anything up to 500 private defense companies,” he said, contrasting this with Russia’s “Soviet-style military-industrial complex, huge factories, bureaucracy, which makes everything very slow.” As a result, he said, “something like 50 to 60% of Ukrainian weapons are produced domestically,” while in drones specifically, “probably close to 100% of those are produced domestically.” Kuzio highlighted how unmanned systems help reduce casualties in what he described as a modern “kill zone,” where “traditional forms of warfare like tanks, trucks, armored personnel carriers cannot operate.” Ground-based drones, he said, can deliver supplies, evacuate wounded soldiers and even spearhead assaults: “They can do the really difficult, dirty work at the beginning, where most of the casualties happen.” Looking ahead, Kuzio argued that Ukraine is already shaping the future of warfare. “The idea would be… you are sending a swarm of drones,” he said, predicting increasingly autonomous systems that “will be no way of jamming the signal.” The broader lesson, he concluded, is that “the Ukrainian battlefield is showing how the 21st-century war is completely changing and completely different.”
