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“It’s the same story here.”
“We’re in a condition where we work all the time, developing so hard. Three years here feels like 20 years in peace time.”
“Some people think, it’s easy, we’ll just do it. But it’s like thousands of secrets, tricks, and experiences that we are collecting inside the company. Without these things, it will not work properly.”

Most countries ‘far behind’ Ukraine in drone combat

Instead of funding startups, Mr Knyazhenko called for Western nations to consider financing Ukrainian factories within their own borders.
“Just finance the factory, and you will have the manufacturer in your country with a really advanced system,” he said. Nobody would try and build an F-16 from scratch, he added, because they would “know it takes so long” and is so hard to do right.
“Every country has the technologies they are good at,” he added. Ukraine’s, clearly, is drones, and it should see its products exported, as with the US-made F-16 jet.
In a July 7 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, two veterans of Joe Biden’s national security council offered a similar assessment. “Having never experienced [drone] combat, most countries in the world, including the United States, are now far behind the Ukrainians in this regard,” wrote Jon Finer and David Shimer.
Asked for an example of the kind of request his team routinely deals with, Mr Knyazhenko recalled a special forces operation in the Black Sea that “went wrong”.