Bloomberg story on Ukrainian Drones

Ukraine Is Fighting Russia With DIY Drones

A Ukrainian soldier trains with a drone designed to carry explosives.Photographer: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Thousands of Ukraine’s deadliest weapons were made on the top three floors of a residential high-rise in Kyiv. The space, which used to be an office for an IT company, contained workstations littered with quadcopters in various stages of assembly, accompanied by clusters of electronic components and circuit boards strewn about the desktops. “It was the cheapest space we could find,” Oleksiy Babenko, founder and chief executive officer of Vyriy Drone, said with a shrug. The only reason Babenko grantedBloomberg Businessweekaccess to the facility, which churned out more than 6,000 exploding drones a month, was because his company was about to relocate to a larger space that would triple its capacity. The threat of becoming a target for Russian cruise missiles makes most Ukrainian drone producers publicity shy. Babenko is an unlikely figure to be running a major defense contractor. Before the war, he roamed around Europe on a motorcycle working as a steampunk street performer, wearing a gas mask and trenchcoat while twirling flaming canisters Now 25 and still sporting a topknot, which he first adopted to avoid lighting his hair on fire, Babenko heads one of Ukraine’s five largest drone producers by volume. Vyriy makes what are known as first-person-view drones. They are to this war what Scud missiles were to the first Iraq war or Tomahawks were to the second. An FPV drone looks a lot like the ones you’d find in a Walmart toy section. It has four propellers and a mounted camera that can wirelessly stream live footage of a flight back to a pilot on the ground. The pilot works a remote resembling a video game controller. The drones were originally used in racing competitions until somebody figured out you could strap a bomb to them with duct tape. Moving at speeds of up to 100 mph, a single FPV drone can be rigged with an explosive powerful enough to disable an armored vehicle. Three can take out a tank.