“More drones, more attacks and fewer Russian ships.” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, gave Reuters that forecast in September 2023, and he backed it with a number: the country’s drone production, he said, had grown “by more than 100 times since last year.”
The minister’s job had been about government apps before the invasion. By 2023 it involved weapons. Fedorov told Reuters that Ukraine was building artificial intelligence systems able to spot targets from a long way off and keep guiding drones through electronic jamming.
What the output looked like by 2025
Speaking to Euronews on 28 March 2025, Fedorov put the domestic share of drones used by Ukraine’s armed forces at about 95%. Some key components still came from China, Europe or the United States, he said. He saw room to grow: “we recognise that there are still new technological stages we need to reach.”
Russia had by then fielded fiber-optic drones that cannot be jammed electronically. Ukraine answered with its own. “We have more than ten companies producing fibre-optic drones,” Fedorov said, adding that hundreds of thousands had already been made.
He did not cast drones as a replacement for everything else. Patriot air defence systems, he said, remain “the backbone of the protection of Ukrainian cities and civilians.” But his picture of the next phase was blunt: “drones will battle drones.”
Recruiting the operators
Machines need crews. Voluntary enlistment had been falling, and President Zelenskyy lowered the draft age from 27 to 25. Fedorov’s ministry built a function in the Diia app so that drone-unit recruits could sign a contract with “minimum bureaucracy.”
One complaint had dogged the effort: operators trained for drone units being moved into infantry roles. Fedorov acknowledged those “high-profile cases” and said protections were now in place. “There is no longer any fear of being reassigned,” he said.
The naval angle
The 2023 Reuters interview came days after a missile strike on the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Crimea. Britain’s Defense Ministry assessed that the landing ship Minsk had been “almost certainly functionally destroyed” and that the submarine Rostov-on-Don “likely suffered catastrophic damage.” Fedorov’s remark about fewer Russian ships came against that backdrop.
Sources
- Ukrainian Minister: Future Holds 'More Drones … Fewer Russian Ships'
- Ukraine's drone tech crucial to frontline superiority, digital transformation minister says
