The Ukrainian war effort is becoming increasingly robotic, with Ukrainian drone strikes deep into Russian territory having become a regular occurrence and President Volodymyr Zelensky recently claiming even to have secured a battlefield victory exclusively with robotic forces, both drones and robotic ground systems. But, as recent developments make clear, a large part of the robotic forces fighting Ukraine’s new style of war are not so much Ukrainian as “German-Ukrainian” and in fact are manufactured in Germany.
Thus, last month, during inter-governmental consultations in Berlin, Zelensky and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced a “strategic partnership” between Germany and Ukraine involving extensive military cooperation and, more specifically, cooperation in the production of robotic systems. According to a report in the German daily Die Welt, Zelensky called the “drone deal” the “biggest deal of its sort in Europe”.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the day after the consultations, the Russian Ministry of Defence published the names and addresses of companies in Europe that it said are manufacturing drones or drone components for the Ukrainian military. In an English-language post on X, former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev explicitly described them as “potential targets” for Russian military strikes.
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