Ukrainian drone maker Airlogix has opened production in the UK, as Kyiv pushes for deeper integration between its defence industry and Western allies.
Oleksandr Kamyshin, the former Ukrainian strategic industries minister who now represents Ukrainian Defense Industry in Germany, revealed the move at the Resilience Conference in London on Tuesday.
It comes after Airlogix CEO Vitalii Kolesnichenko said at the conference on Monday that the company was pursuing manufacturing partnerships in the UK and Canada, alongside further expansion into Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands and the US.
Airlogix has already established production in Germany through a joint venture with defence software company Auterion. Kolesnichenko said Russian attacks on Airlogix production sites had forced the company to spread manufacturing across multiple locations to build resilience.
Kamyshin said Ukraine’s wider defence industry has undergone a dramatic transformation since Russia’s full-scale invasion. During the first year of the war, the country’s entire industry produced just 2,000 drones of all types. Today, he said, a single Ukrainian company can produce 5,000 a day.
Ukraine also now has more than 1,000 companies working across aerial, ground, sea and underwater systems.
But Kamyshin argued Ukraine cannot compete with Russia simply through an “economy of scale”.
“We can’t overplay them with the money, but we have to be faster and better,” he said, describing what Ukraine now needs as an “economy of skill”.
That also means forging much closer links between Ukraine’s defence industry and the West. Kamyshin said Ukraine’s industrial base had historically been integrated eastwards with Russia and other countries.
“We have to integrate in the West, so it should work both ways,” he said. “Smart people from Ukraine have to establish themselves in Europe and make Europe stronger. That’s how we make all of us together stronger.
“Smart people from US have to come to Ukraine and establish themselves in Ukraine and make their products better in Ukraine,” Kamyshin added.
Tiberius Aerospace is preparing to do just that. Founder and CEO Chad Steelberg said the US defence company has opened an office in Ukraine, which it is currently staffing, and expects to establish its presence there by the end of October.
Steelberg said access to suitable weapons testing ranges in the US and Europe had proved difficult, while ITAR restrictions and lengthy procurement processes make it harder to rapidly test advanced systems in Ukraine.
Tiberius wants to take a more distributed approach to weapons development and manufacturing across allied nations, which Steelberg described as “weaponising the supply chain”.
The company is also developing modular munitions and missiles that can be modified as battlefield conditions change. Steelberg said countermeasures in Ukraine can emerge within about eight weeks, making the ability to adapt weapons quickly increasingly important.
Tiberius is using US Technology Assistance Agreements to give partner nations access to underlying technology so they can modify weapon systems themselves.
“We need to weaponize the supply chain and the free market economy if we want to help dominate and hopefully survive in these conflicts,” Steelberg said.
For Kamyshin, the model runs in both directions: Ukrainian companies establishing themselves in Europe, while Western companies bring their technology into Ukraine. Airlogix’s UK expansion and Tiberius’s arrival in Ukraine offer examples of both.
