Katie Livingstone
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine warned allied governments for years to prepare for a new kind of war, one in which cheap, mass-produced drones would overwhelm both the tactics and economics of traditional air defense.
“You don’t have time,” Andrii Hrytseniuk, the CEO of Brave1, recalled telling officials in recent years. “Shahed [drones] will come not only to Ukraine, but to other countries. You need to use your time not to stick to previous conventional warfare, but to work on the new era.”
Brave1 was established in 2023 as Ukraine’s state-backed defense innovation hub, which funds, tests, and fast-tracks new military technology from hundreds of Ukrainian startups.
Three years after Brave1’s formation, the Iran war has made Hrytseniuk’s warning prescient.
In the first week alone, the U.S. and Israel struck more than 3,000 targets across Iran while Tehran fired over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones at U.S. bases and Israeli cities across 12 countries, burning through over 800 Patriot interceptor missiles in three days — more than Ukraine received from allies throughout four years of war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pointed out on Thursday.
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