Anne Applebaum
In one section of a sprawling warehouse in central Ukraine, workers have stacked what appear to be small airplane wings in neat rows. In another section, a group of men is huddled around what looks like the body of an aircraft, adjusting an electronic panel. In makeshift locations elsewhere in Ukraine, workers are producing these electronic panels from scratch: This company wants to use as few imported parts as possible, avoiding anything American, anything Chinese. Jewelers, I was told, have turned out to be well suited for this kind of finicky manufacturing. Ukraine’s justly celebrated manicurists are good at it too.
They are not alone in being new to the job. Everyone in this factory had a different profession three years ago, because this factory did not exist three years ago. Nor did the Ukrainian drone industry, of which it forms part. Whatever their job description before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, everyone at this production site is now part of a major shift in the politics and economics of the war, one that hasn’t been fully understood by all of Ukraine’s allies.
Once almost entirely dependent on imports of weapons from abroad, the Ukrainians are now producing millions of drones, large and small, as well as other kinds of weapons, every year. They are using them most famously on the front line, where they have prevented the Russians from making large-scale gains this year, despite dire headlines, and where they have ensured that any territory occupied by the Russians comes at a terrible price, in equipment and lives. The Ukrainians have also used sea drones to clear their Black Sea coast of Russian ships, an accomplishment that seemed impossible even to imagine at the start of the war.
Finally, they are using drones to hit distant targets, deep inside Russia, and lately they are hitting so many military objects, refineries, and pipelines that some Ukrainians believe they can do enough damage to force the Russians to end the war. On Monday, they once again struck Gazprom’s fuel-processing plant in Astrakhan, for example, one of the largest gas-chemical complexes in the world and an important source of both gasoline and diesel. Yesterday, they hit a key part of an oil pipeline in Bryansk. Presumably President Volodymyr Zelensky transmitted this optimism to President Donald Trump, who again upended his administration’s previous policies yesterday and declared that Ukraine is “in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”
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