Ukraine and the European Union (EU) have sealed a ‘drone deal’, aiming to combine Kyiv’s expertise with EU industrial capacity to establish joint projects and scale up production, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said yesterday.
“We need to combine our strengths,” Von der Leyen said in a speech in Kyiv at a ceremony to mark Ukraine’s Statehood Day. “This deal will bring together Ukrainian ingenuity and Europe’s industrial scale.”
Von der Leyen said the EU could offer advantages to Ukraine such as ‘huge technological and industrial capacity’ and ‘safe and secure production sites’.
Ukraine has signed a series of such drone deals with individual countries. At last week’s Nato summit in Ankara, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signed three more, saying that brought the total to nine.
But yesterday’s deal is the first intended to cover countries and companies across the EU. It is part of a new EU-Ukraine defence industrial partnership which the commission, the EU’s executive body, said would expand to include anti-ballistic missiles by 2028.
“We will do everything necessary to build Europe’s anti-ballistic system by integrating all European anti-ballistic capabilities,” Zelenskiy said in his speech to the ceremony.
Meanwhile, the chief engineer at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has been killed by a Ukrainian drone near the station, the head of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom said yesterday.
Alexei Likhachev said in a statement that a Ukrainian drone had struck a service car between the plant’s site and the town of Enerhodar, killing the engineer, Alexander Yakovlev, and the driver.
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