UNDISCLOSED, Ukraine (AFP) — Ukrainian soldiers frowned as they pored over a small device plugged into a computer — a drone interceptor captured from the Russian side.
The green device with a dome-shaped nose and 30-centimeter wingspan epitomizes the technological arms race playing out between Kyiv and Moscow as their troops battle on the sprawling front line.
Deployed in their hundreds by both sides every day, drones have become the chief technology of the war, scouting out enemy positions and packed with explosives to crash down into soldiers, vehicles and equipment.
They have transformed the front line into a 15-kilometer deep kill-zone and overhauled the very strategy of modern warfare.
Ukraine first deployed drone interceptors in spring 2024, having judged them effective against the thousands of Russian Geran-2 attack drones that bombard Ukrainian cities and infrastructure every month.
The specimen showed that Moscow has now caught up.
“They copied our model,” said Konstantin, the 27-year-old deputy commander of an anti-aircraft unit in Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps.
But Russia printed theirs from a single block of material, meaning it is “faster and cheaper to produce.”
The 3D-printed interceptors, which race towards larger drones to take them out mid-air, have been a turning point in both the technology and economics of air defense.
US Patriot missiles, which Ukraine has and wants more of, cost about $3 million a shot.
Konstantin held up a Ukrainian drone interceptor that he said cost just $2,000 to make.
Such a price is more viable when facing hundreds of targets a day, and Ukraine’s defense ministry has ordered their mass production.
Soldiers say Ukraine’s front line has become a laboratory for military innovation, and Kyiv pitches itself as being at the forefront of low-cost, cutting-edge technology.
Now it hopes to leverage that expertise with its European partners, after years of reliance on whatever weapons its Western backers agreed to send.
And experts say drone warfare appears to have outdated some of North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) strengths, such as in heavy equipment and centralized logistics.
To Konstantin, NATO’s techniques are “no longer very effective.”
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga made the same observation earlier this month.
“The modern arms race is not about nukes — it is about millions of cheap drones,” he said.