KYIV, July 14 — Colonel Vadym Sukharevskyi sits atop a military branch that did not exist two years ago. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed him commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces on May 10, 2024, carving out a separate service from the traditional ground and air arms. The mechanics here are straightforward: Ukraine institutionalised drone warfare long before most Western militaries even wrote the doctrine.
Sukharevskyi’s biography tracks the arc of the war itself. Before the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, he had a background in the Ukrainian Air Force and had already been decorated, including with the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
When the invasion began, he moved into drone operations as a deputy commander of the Ukrainian Ground Forces. The catch is that his promotion to lead the Unmanned Systems Forces in May 2024 signalled a strategic bet: Kyiv was no longer treating drones as an auxiliary tool but as a primary arm of combat.
Scaling production and striking at sea
Sukharevskyi has publicly stated that Ukraine aims to produce 1 million drones per year by 2025. That is a production target that, if met, would make Ukraine one of the world’s largest drone manufacturers relative to its economy. Follow the money: domestic drone manufacturing at that scale requires sustained budget allocation, a functioning industrial base under wartime conditions, and a supply chain that does not collapse under Russian missile strikes.
His command has overseen the integration of both UAVs and USVs into Ukrainian military strategy. On the naval side, that includes the Magura V5 naval drone — a weapon that has allowed a country with virtually no conventional navy to strike Russian vessels in the Black Sea.
The January 20, 2025 strike, which Sukharevskyi’s forces executed, hit over 1,500 Russian targets and 15 vessels. On closer reading, that single operation suggests a level of coordination that blends intelligence, targeting, and mass deployment of unmanned systems in a way few militaries have attempted.
What to watch
The question now is sustainability. Ukraine’s stated production goal of 1 million drones per year by 2025 is ambitious, but the war’s attrition rate for drones is brutal. Sukharevskyi’s forces consume them in the thousands per month.
The real test will be whether Ukraine can maintain that production tempo while also fielding increasingly sophisticated systems — and whether Western partners will continue to fund the component supply chains that make it possible.
