A Two-Sided Partnership

For the past four years, Ukraine has been forced to defend itself against a far bigger and better-equipped opponent in Russia. The gap between the two armies in February 2022 was stark: Russian armed forces were estimated to be five times the size of Ukraine's, with five times more armoured fighting vehicles and ten times more aircraft. Despite substantial Western support in equipment, Ukraine has remained significantly outnumbered in both personnel and hardware.

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This imbalance forced the rapid development of cheap technologies to close the gap and save Ukrainian lives. Ukraine has led the way in battlefield drone use, from tactical FPV strikes to long-range attacks and disruption of Russian logistics. Ukrainian miltech companies are especially effective because of their direct contact with soldiers: feedback from the front line lets engineers iterate in weeks rather than the years, or even decades, typical of Western defence contractors.

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This rapid R&D, and access to the technologies it produces, gives a real advantage to the British Army as it invests heavily in modernisation. Ukraine's offer goes beyond sharing knowledge and hardware — it extends to joint training and munitions production, building secure supply chains and interoperable forces ready to fight together in future conflicts. Access to Ukrainian drone technology is a meaningful step toward strengthening the British Army: these systems already sustain logistics and evacuation in the grey zone of the battlefield, cutting losses while keeping soldiers supplied in active combat. The same drones disrupt enemy logistics, forcing opposing forces to withdraw or surrender for lack of munitions. Through this partnership, the UK stands to inherit knowledge that puts the British Army a step ahead in any future conflict.

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This cooperation is already underway. Ukrspecsystems, Ukraine's largest drone manufacturer, has opened its first factory in the UK, backed by a £200 million investment. The site combines an 11,000 m² production facility in Mildenhall with a testing and training centre at Elmsett, both in Suffolk, and at full capacity is expected to turn out up to 1,000 drones a month, including the PD-2 and SHARK-M models already fielded by Ukraine's Armed Forces. The factory is projected to create up to 500 jobs and was formally opened by the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry alongside Ukraine's Ambassador to the UK, who framed it as evidence of a new European security architecture built on shared production rather than one-way aid. The UK has already ordered more than 80 SHARK and Mini-SHARK drones from Ukrspecsystems, and the factory sits alongside a wider £1 billion UK commitment to Ukraine's air defences since mid-2024, part of a £4.5 billion Ministry of Defence support package aimed at intercepting Russian drone and missile strikes at a lower cost. Under the 100-year partnership, this is expected to be the first of several such factories on British soil, moving Ukrainian production onto UK territory partly to shield it from Russian strikes and partly to build a more resilient, allied industrial base — making the British Armed Forces more resilient to future threats and better equipped for modern warfare.

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Scrutiny of the wider agreement has been more mixed than the drone deal alone might suggest. The House of Lords International Agreements Committee welcomed the rationale behind the 100-year partnership but found it short on implementation detail, and recommended the agreement be reviewed if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace settlement. That caution is worth bearing in mind for the defence pillar too: the benefit to the UK depends less on the partnership's existence than on how quickly commitments like the Ukrspecsystems factory are followed by others.