Russia plans to produce more than 32,000 drones every year by 2030, and domestic manufacturers will account for 70% of the market, First Vice Prime Minister Andriy Belousov said on Saturday, TASS reports.

Drones have been widely used by Moscow and Kiev since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and both camps have been building up their military might as the war drags on, Reuters reported.

“The annual volume of production of unmanned aerial vehicles – excluding training ones – is planned to be 32,500 units,” Belousov told TASS. “This is almost three times higher than the current volume of production.”

“At the same time, it is planned that the share of Russian drones will be 70% of the market,” the official said.

Moscow is increasingly using Iranian-made Shahed drones, known in Ukraine for their loud gasoline engines, for airstrikes on infrastructure far behind the front lines in the east and south of the country.

Russia will fund a national drone project with 696 billion rubles ($7.66 billion) until 2030, said Belousov, who will release more details this month.

Last year, President Vladimir Putin said drones could be used in almost every industry, not just the military.

At first, Russian drones confused Ukrainian air defense because they were harder to detect than missiles, and shooting down cheap drones with expensive air defense missiles was not the most profitable strategy.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is actively using FPV drones — small drones originally designed for civilian use but modified for combat — as a cheap but effective option for reconnaissance and strikes, a tactic that Russia has copied.

In December, Ukraine said it plans to produce more than 11,000 medium- and long-range attack drones by 2024, as well as one million FPV (first-person view) drones, which are in high demand on the front lines.