Gulf nations ‘trying to reach out’ for Ukrainian counter-drone capability

KYIV — As some Iranian drones continue to sneak through the air defenses of Gulf nations, the governments under fire are increasingly seeking help from industry in the one country in the world most adept at defeating the unmanned menace: Ukraine.

“At the moment almost every nation of the Middle East that Iran is attacking — which is to say almost every nation — is trying to reach out,” Marko Kushnir, head of communications for General Cherry, one of Ukraine’s largest drone producers, told Breaking Defense. “They’re coming our way through completely different channels, there are some private companies, some funds, some government representatives, some NGOs — all through various finances, we’re receiving a huge number of requests.”

Major deals, like the one reportedly brewing involving Saudi Arabia, could mean a much-needed windfall for Kyiv as it heads into its fourth year fending off a Russian invasion. Over the weekend Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine had sent three teams to different countries in the Middle East to demonstrate drone defenses, hopeful for a financial return.

“For us today, both the technology and the funding are important,” Zelenskyy told reporters on Sunday, according to Reuters.

While Ukraine’s economy is heavily militarized, money is tight for buying more weapons. Manufacturers tout new foreign funding as a means of bolstering both the local economy and the weapons they can supply to Ukraine’s domestic defenses directly. 

“The manufacturers have repeatedly said that they could produce more if they had more money. Getting export deals may be one way to ramp up the production beyond what the internal funding in Ukraine can offer,” Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral student at the University of Oslo and specialist in missiles, told Breaking Defense.

Iranian-made Shahed drones have swarmed across Ukraine’s skies since early in the war with Russia. Moscow bought up its first batch from Iran in late in 2022, eventually building out its own production of local copies, also known as Gerans, Garpias and Gerberas — though the low-cost unmanned attack drones are collectively still often referred to as Shaheds. At times, swarms of over 700 fly across Ukraine in a single night.

In response, Ukraine has built a whole ecosystem of “layered” air defenses — one in which cheap aerial weapons are met with correspondingly cheap anti-air defenses. This averts a situation where a multi-million Patriot missile blows up a $20,000 UAV. Even for the relative wealth of the United States against Iran, that is an unsustainable deal to make repeatedly — particularly when PAC-2 and PAC-3 missile production is maxed out worldwide.

Ukraine’s interceptor drones are a new and far cheaper means of shooting down a drone than any other on the market. But Ukraine’s ability to shoot down such drones economically is for the moment unique, while other countries race to catch up with their own domestic production.

It’s not an impossible technology to replicate. 

“They’re not high-tech at all, right? And they’re also not supposed to be. They’re supposed to be a solution that works against a specific type of threat,” said Hoffmann. 

An interceptor drone is functionally a supercharged first-person-view (FPV) drone of the type made famous in military missions at the front of the Russian-Ukrainian War. The first “interceptors” were just FPVs flown directly into ISR drones lingering above Ukrainian positions.

As the technology advanced, interceptors started reaching the speeds and strike power necessary to take on Russian Shahed drones last summer.

The Ukrainian firm Wild Hornets produces the Sting, the first mass-produced anti-drone drone and likely the one model that has seen the most action in Ukraine. A representative for Wild Hornets told Breaking Defense that they are currently working on a “Sting 2,” whose primary advantage would be that it can catch jet-powered Shaheds, which outpace many Ukrainian interceptor models.

Many of Iran’s stockpiled Shahed drones are, by contrast, clunky, flying in relatively straight lines at medium heights — the kind that even the oldest models of interceptor drones in Ukraine can catch.

And while total numbers of interceptor drones currently produced in Ukraine are a closely guarded secret, producers tout figures of tens of thousands. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, wrote at the beginning of March that interceptor drones performed 6,300 sorties over the course of February.

As part of his own press tour on the basis of Ukraine’s interceptors, Zelenskyy told the British Parliament on Tuesday that his country could produce 2,000 a day, of which they needed 1,000 to stay in Ukraine. That leaves some 30,000 per month open.

“All the foreigners right now are emphasizing our interceptor drones,” wrote Serhiy “Flash” Beskrestnov, a soldier, EW specialist and recent advisor to the Defense Ministry, on Telegram on March 13. “We have in total a few makers who are time-tested and militarily practical. It’s understood that foreigners are reaching out to them.”

There is, however, a catch. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has maintained export controls on domestic weapons, controlled via the Zelenskyy administration. Manufacturers have told Breaking Defense that they are getting constant inquiries, but the issue remains in the government’s hands.

“As is well known, government leadership is looking for paths to help partners and at the same time not reduce Ukraine’s ability to defend itself,” a representative for TAF Drones, which makes the TAF-I10 and “Octopus” Interceptors, told Breaking Defense. “When people from the Middle East reach out to us we emphasize that to receive the necessary permissions for cooperation, they’d better turn to Ukraine’s government agencies.” 

The head of Ukraine’s export office, Oleh Tsilvik, maintained that there had been “no new regulations.”

Current interest is not a permanent state of affairs, Beskrestnov cautioned in his message.

“The global military market is made in such a way that demand on interceptor drones will be filled by other developed nations. Americans already make good drones, so for our manufacturers right now there is a unique window of opportunity to enter the global market,” he said.

The US has already sent 10,000 Merops drones, a project by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt that received extensive testing in Ukraine, to help defend infrastructure in the Middle East.

Even worse for Ukraine than losing out to American makers would be to lose to industrial competitors from the other country now with years of experience combating the drone threat: Russia. Some Gulf nations have traditionally shown no qualms in doing business with Moscow-based arms brokers.