Russia’s invasion has created a defense tech revolution that’s going global as Ukraine-style warfare proliferates. Some defense companies will succeed. Many others will fail.
The difference between them is their willingness to learn from what Ukrainian forces need on the battlefield, warfighters said at the Kyiv Defense Tech Week, which took place between 27 April and 3 May.
Ukraine’s defense industry more than doubled in 2025, according to the Kyiv School of Economics. Foreign firms are coming in greater numbers to test their products in live-fire conditions or offer them to the men and women standing between Russia and the rest of Europe.
But Ukrainian combat veterans said that for every brilliant answer to a real battlefield challenge, there is an overengineered solution in search of a problem, or a copy of something that already exists.
They then named what’s missing: mesh communications systems, better batteries, scalable UGVs, smarter electronic warfare, systems for infantry protection, among other technologies. Scalability and standardization are critical factors, too, as brigades try to move from a chaotic “zoo” of systems towards reliable supply chains that require minimal field tinkering.
Ukrainian and foreign firms looking to get into the Ukrainian market—or draw lessons from it to succeed in modern conflicts elsewhere—and those who would invest in these companies would do well to keep the following lessons in mind.
What tells you that a company is worth it?
“It's their openness to hearing the feedback, good or bad,” Mykyta Puz, a technology liaison with the Azov Corps, told Euromaidan Press in an interview. “And their ability to quickly adapt to the feedback that they're hearing if we're talking about startups.”
Very often, companies, especially startups, tend to build something they think is valid based on cursory research, he said.
“For example I had guys pitching me a three-meter wingspan multi-use interceptor drone with a jet engine and I was like conceptually yeah this sounds cool but… based on the size of your equipment is going to be have a huge radar cross-section, and we have a sky saturated with Shaheds, it will just be shot down.”
In another example, manufacturers pitched a product whose selling point is radio stealth. Puz said this misunderstands the battlefield, which is “so oversaturated with thousands of signals that it's not a concern anymore. And you spent like half a year several million investments in order to make you ‘radio silent.’ Why would you do that?"
Puz said Azov and Ukrainian forces more broadly are looking for companies that see a clear problem and set out to find a solution for it. The problem has to be deeper than "we need to shoot down aerial targets." Context matters.
“When I ask the guys, like, what is your concept of operation? And they say, ‘you tell us.’ I'm like, no guys, you got to start from the concept of operation from a scenario and then you build the technology on it. I don't need ultra super quantum high tech, you know.”
Captain Markiian Yatsyniak of the 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment RAID, said something similar.
“Only specific kinds of manufacturers who are still in close, efficient communication with end-users like us… may have a chance to be successful in expanding and exporting Ukrainian experience all over the globe.”
Puz and Yatsyniak said that with the current pace of innovation on the battlefield, companies have three or four months between tackling an idea and showing that it works on the battlefield, occasionally given a bit of grace time for manufacturing.
“If we're interested in a certain solution for a particular thing, we give them at least four-five months to show efficiency,” Yatsyniak said. “If not, we just sweep the page.”
What specific problems need to be solved right now?
Radio communication and mesh networks
“There are two areas where I think innovation needs to happen,” Puz said. The first is “communication systems… data links, command and control systems. Mesh systems are becoming a buzzword. Like really scalable, robust mesh systems designed for battlefield use.”
In other words, a system that can cover 100 square kilometers with a network of mesh nodes that can provide stable data connection for equipment to fly or drive through, with redundancy. “This is what I haven’t seen at all, yet.”
Yatsyniak added that the Ukrainian military just needs radios in general, as units are forced to wait months to get their hands on some. “The shelves of Ukrainian UAV manufacturers are full of drones, but empty of radios.”
Better batteries
Another need is high-capacity batteries, Puz said. “Something above 400 watt-hours per kilogram. I think this is where there is a huge amount of opportunity for great companies, but it requires advanced chemistry knowledge.”
Pawell Power is one success story in this space: through careful iteration, they figured out how to double battery efficiency last year. But there is plenty of room for additional innovation from other companies.
More simple, scalable Unmanned Ground Vehicles
Andrei Kushniarou, Commander of the 108 Battalion “Da Vinci Wolves” and UGV expert, said that cheap, simple UGVs are in demand, as his unit’s goal is to equip every small team of soldiers with a UGV that can go in front to demine, carry equipment, or draw FPV fire.
According to KSE, the UGV market is still very young and has yet to reach its full potential, worth just $252 million in 2025. Still, this market is “highly diversified” by manufacturer, with room for producers to enter if they have good products.
Better Unmanned Ground Vehicles for casevac
Kushniarou added that in spite of glowing news reports on UGVs evacuating wounded troops, really good casevac machines are not available on the market—casualty evacuation is being done by machines specced for logistics tasks and aren’t great at handling the wounded.
“Right now on the market, there are zero UGVs for medical evacuation,” he said. “Medical evacuation is a priority for many units… for that, we simply don't have any specialized solutions right now.”
Even as logistics UGVs proliferate, casevac remains extremely challenging, with several soldiers telling Euromaidan Press that it can often take days and multiple steps to pull wounded people out of their positions to a safe area.
More protection for infantry
“We should improve the abilities of the regular infantry man or operator,” Kushniarou said. “It's like a shield and spear battle from ancient times. Your attacking ability and your defense ability. Our attacking ability now was significantly improved by FPVs.”
“But the defense of the regular soldier is on a really low level. Probably the last significant improvement was armor vests. We need something new. We need individual interceptors to remove FPVs, some anti-FPV turrets, some different types of defense on the field and so on.”
Wider-band EW and detection systems
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Callsign Archean, an electronic warfare specialist with Azov, said that EW and drone detection systems that work across broader ranges of frequencies are needed.
“EW solutions must be universal. It must work from, 400 MHz to 8 GHz minimum, if we’re talking about jamming or spoofing options,” he said. “If we talk about detection today, we like to see solutions from 200 MHz to 15 GHz.”
Communication protocols and modulation are also fertile ground for innovation, Archean added.
Ukraine’s EW sector has expanded rapidly in recent years, moving from a relatively small and volatile segment to one of the key technology-driven components of the defense ecosystem. In 2025, this part of the market generated $220 million, growing 3.4 times.
AI-enhanced analytics
Multiple veterans said that the most useful direction of AI technologies is in analyzing data after their job is done: crunching through reconnaissance intel, assisting with logistics, enhancing jamming and electronic intelligence.
These tools help with assimilating the terabytes of data Ukraine collects each day. They both increase the speed at which military decisions can be made and also tend to amplify the impact of any one decision, retired Lt. Col. Christopher Ghorbani of the US Army said in a previous interview.
Other useful AI tools include converting photos and videos from drones into 3D maps for better situational awareness.
Working with troops to identify further problems
While feedback from the troops is important, not all brigades have an equal understanding of what their principal challenges are, according to Kushniarou.
“We're facing a problem of creating analytical centers” at the brigade level, he said. “In famous units like Azov and Khartia, this problem is already close to being solved. But for many brigades, they simply don’t have any analytical centers.”
Such centers are important for troops to outline their needs. This is especially critical for UGVs, to figure out what works best and what to buy. Many UGV operators are relatively inexperienced.
“And this is also an area where you can invest,” Kushniarou said. “It's analytics. its statistics, and its communication between different UGV's."
"It's the planning of missions, also a great problem. I know cases where operators use the same route to deliver logistics for a half a year.”
“My advice is that investors should come directly to units and not only listen to them, but try to work with them to find out what's really happening.”
Scalability, standardization more important than FPV #1,000
Multiple veterans said that they don’t need yet another FPV that’s functionally the same as the majority of others on the market, while also coming with its own teething troubles that the unit must spend time fixing.
“Everyone… is making drones which are conceptually the same thing,” Puz said. “But the problem is that none of this is standardized or scalable. Quality control is always a very big problem because you cannot rely on stable equipment to come in.”
Most units are forced to maintain their own workshops or even R&D laboratories to modify or improve equipment that comes to them, in order to make it combat-capable. Few things are ready out of the box. This is especially an issue with UGVs, soldiers said.
"It's a terrible zoo inside of a lot of units when you have 20, 25 different types of UGV's, none of them are working from the box,” Kushniarou said. “We have to modify everything.”
While continued innovation and incremental improvement will remain important, the time has come to invest in standardization, industrialization, and scalability.
Ukraine doesn't have the kind of industrial base Western countries do, with its Soviet-inherited industry eroding over the years and being pounded with Russian attacks. The scientific base has eroded from brain drain. However, foreign companies lack the awareness of what to make compared to Ukrainians.
“The trend is that both of us are trying to industrialize through the framework of joint ventures,” Puz said. “Or Western companies opening up offices in Ukraine.”
“There needs to be a model of cooperation. It's slowly getting there. There is a good trend that I'm observing but let's see how it goes.”
What kinds of technologies are overhyped?
There are a variety of products and tech that the veterans see as overhyped — from overly-expensive, over-engineered solutions, to the role of battlefield AI.
While machine learning is helping make drones more precise at navigating or locking onto targets, full-spectrum autonomy is a long way off, they said.
“Total BS: replacing the human factor in UAV operations. Even until now we cannot hand over the control to the AI,” Yatsyniak said. “We have manual real people, operators who make final decisions. So any advertisement by manufacturers that their drones are flying fully autonomously is a lie.”
Puz said that drone swarms are a way off as well, not just technologically, but in their purpose and application as well. “I still have yet to see any proper concept of operation for those.”
While drone swarms would be useful for a paramilitary group conducting terrorist attacks against civilian infrastructure, they are less useful for an organized military fighting another military force, he believes.
“We don't have this kind of problem to solve,” he told Euromaidan Press. “But I would love to be wrong about that.”
