Germany is paying for 50,000 strike drones destined for Ukraine, according to a source cited by Reuters. The order is worth about €90 million ($103 million). Lorenz Meier, CEO of the U.S. defence technology firm Auterion, confirmed how big the contract is and said a European country funded it.
SkyFall, the Ukrainian manufacturer, confirmed that Germany was involved. It said it could not comment on details of the purchase.
What is in the order
The drones are Shrike first-person-view (FPV) models built by SkyFall, one of Ukraine’s major drone makers. Auterion supplies the software. It is designed to track moving targets on its own and hit them in the last stretch of the flight.
Some have already reached Ukraine’s government, Meier told Reuters. The rest are due to be sent this year.
The Shrike is a low-cost drone that has been used in Ukraine since 2023, and it has recently drawn attention abroad. A version called the Shrike 10-F, which SkyFall makes with the UK company Skycutter, topped the leaderboard in the first round of a Pentagon-run competition. That contest is part of a $1.1 billion initiative to buy hundreds of thousands of one-way attack drones. Auterion said its software is used in several entries.
A crowded supply picture
Germany’s order is one piece of a larger flow. Meier said Auterion is helping to supply 100,000 drones to Ukraine this year, working with different hardware makers and funded by several Western governments. A $50 million Pentagon contract for 33,000 of them has been delivered, he said.
Britain said last month it would give Ukraine 150,000 drones this year as part of a £752 million ($1.01 billion) funding package.
The demand is there. Ukraine has leaned heavily on unmanned vehicles through a war now more than four years old, producing millions of drones a year while its forces carry out thousands of drone strikes every day.
