Ukraine will produce thousands of long-range drones this year capable of delivering deep strikes on Russian territory, and already has ten companies producing drones capable of reaching Moscow and St. Petersburg, Ukrainian Digitalization Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said on Monday, Reuters reports. Agerpres.

In an interview with a British press agency, Fedorov mentioned the Ukrainian military drone production sector after a wave of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil installations in recent weeks.

“The category of long-range kamikaze unmanned aerial vehicles with a range of 300, 500, 700 and 1000 kilometers is growing. Two years ago, this category did not exist at all,” said the Ukrainian minister.

Mykhailo Fedorov, 33, is at the center of Ukraine’s efforts to encourage private military startups to innovate and strengthen the drone industry in the context of the continuation of the unjustified and unprovoked war launched by Russia in February 2022 against the neighboring country.

According to Fedorov, the recent series of attacks on Russian oil targets reflects the government’s progress in rapidly liberalizing the drone market and increasing funding for it.

Grants of approximately $2.5 million were awarded to military technology startups through the BRAVE1 initiative launched by the government in Kyiv last year, and this year the amount will increase tenfold, he explained.

“We will fight to increase funding even more,” the Ukrainian official added.

Unlike Russia, where the state dominates the production of drones, the vast majority of drone manufacturers in Ukraine are private. Fedorov noted that only one of the 10 companies whose drones can reach Moscow or St. Petersburg is state-owned.

Since the first year of the war in Ukraine, Russia has used thousands of long-range Iranian Shahed drones, which fly to a target and detonate a payload on impact.

Last year, the Ukrainian government contracted 300,000 drones

According to Mykhailo Fedorov, in 2023, the level of production and supply of Ukrainian drones will increase more than 120 times.

In total, last year, the Ukrainian government ordered more than 300,000 drones of various types, of which at least 100,000 were sent to the front, explained the Ukrainian minister, clarifying that these figures do not include voluntary deliveries, which have a “significant contribution.”

“We removed the taxation of UAV components, simplified the procurement procedure and the decommissioning procedure,” he said.

“That is, we took all the bottlenecks faced by private companies and solved them in six months by passing all the necessary laws and regulations.”

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has set Ukraine the task of producing one million inexpensive first-person-view (FPV) drones this year.

Ukraine’s drone industry is largely dependent on components from foreign countries, including China, which is widely considered an ally of Russia. Fedorov noted that there were attempts to localize the production of components.

“That’s why I think if we continue this trend, by the end of this year we’ll have a lot of companies producing more than 50% of their components locally.”