Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense announces purchase of 20,000 Chinese drones

2024-03-08

On March 6, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine announced the purchase of 20,000 Chinese-made civilian drones (Figure 1) from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense procurement system, including small, four-axis and other models.

This is the largest single purchase of Chinese-made civilian drones that the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has admitted to so far. It is currently unclear through what channels the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense purchased such a huge amount of Chinese-made civilian drones. 3 billion hryvnia (about 562.5 million yuan), and a single purchase exceeds 200 million to 300 million hryvnia.

Earlier, Ukrainian Prime Minister Shmigal said: “Ukraine purchased a Chinese-made civilian drone, accounting for 60% of global production.” Although China has banned the public sale of Chinese-made civilian drones to the Ukrainian military and the Russian military, machine. Earlier, the Ukrainian Armed Forces began to experience a shortage of drones. The Ukrainian army hopes that the U.S. government will provide drones to make up for the shortage as soon as possible.

To be honest, in the past two years since the Russian-Ukrainian war broke out, the Chinese-made civilian drones and FPV flying machines have developed a brand effect. The performance of the Chinese-made civilian drones and FPV flying machines is better than that of the military drones. Stabilize. The practice has proven that Chinese-made civilian drones and FPV traversing aircraft cannot be dealt with by effective air defense systems under field conditions. The arms business is like this. There can be several middlemen in the middle, but Chinese companies have nothing to do. Next time, Russia will still buy tens of thousands of Chinese-made civilian drones from second-rate dealers.