Section 2

What Ukraine Has Built and Why It Matters

2.1 The stack in summary

Ukraine's defence-technology ecosystem is best understood as a four-layer stack composed of elements that were built between 2014 and 2022 for civilian purposes and elements that have been built since 2022 for defence purposes. The civilian base made the defence superstructure possible, and the defence superstructure could not have been built in the timescale it has without the civilian base.

Layer 1 — Digital public infrastructure

The foundation layer is digital public infrastructure. Trembita, Ukraine's interoperability platform, was launched in 2018 on the basis of the Estonian X-Road system with European Union backing. It now connects more than 150 state registries and has processed more than 14 billion data exchanges as of mid-2025. Diia, the citizen-facing application launched in 2020, sits on top of Trembita and provides digital identity, documents, and services to more than 22 million Ukrainians. Prozorro, the public procurement platform, was built between 2014 and 2016 as an anti-corruption reform and provides transparent, auditable, and competitive procurement across all state purchasing. These three elements — federated data exchange, unified digital identity, transparent procurement — constitute the civilian substrate.

Layer 2 — The innovation cluster

The second layer is the innovation cluster. Brave1, established in April 2023 jointly by the Ministries of Digital Transformation, Defence, Strategic Industries, and Economy, the General Staff, and the National Security and Defence Council, is the defence-technology platform. It ran an initial budget of approximately £2 million and has now scaled to more than £30 million. It provides grants in brackets up to approximately £1 million per company, runs the Brave1 Market catalogue and certification process, operates the Test in Ukraine programme for foreign companies, and hosts the annual Defense Tech Valley investment summit. Fifty Ukrainian defence-technology startups raised more than $105 million in venture and angel funding in 2025, up from $5 million in 2023. In November 2025, NATO and Ukraine launched UNITE – Brave NATO jointly, with Brave1 coordinating the Ukrainian side and the NATO Communications and Information Agency running the first round of competitions.

Layer 3 — Battle management

The third layer is battle management. DELTA, built since 2016 by the A2724 military unit and the Centre of Innovations and Defence Technologies Development within the Ministry of Defence, is a cloud-native modular battlespace management ecosystem. It won NATO Allied Command Transformation's TIDE Hackathon in 2017, was unveiled publicly in October 2022, formally commissioned in February 2023, and rolled out across the Armed Forces in August 2024. It exchanges data in NATO Vector Graphics and Multilateral Interoperability Programme formats, has been tested at successive Coalition Warrior Interoperability Exercises, and in July 2024 passed a NATO-standard information security audit covering 162 cyber defence measures over six weeks. At least one NATO country is in active negotiations to purchase the system. Its modules — Deltamonitor for the common operational picture, Target Hub for fire coordination, Vezha for drone video analysis, Mission Control for UAV crew coordination, Secure Chat for encrypted communications — compose rather than integrate, and new modules are added as operational demand emerges.

Layer 4 — Procurement and fulfilment

The fourth layer is procurement and fulfilment. The Defence Procurement Agency, reformed under Arsen Zhumadilov, operates framework agreements on Prozorro based on tactical-technical specifications rather than named products, permitting any manufacturer whose drone meets the specification to be contracted at scale. DOT-Chain Defence, a digital marketplace launched in 2024, permits military units to select weapons directly from a catalogue of certified suppliers. By November 2025, 180 brigades and two National Guard corps had access to the system; more than 80 drone manufacturers had onboarded, offering over 400 UAV types. Between January and July 2025, the Defence Procurement Agency supplied more than one million FPV drones to the Armed Forces, against a contracted total of two million for the year. By end-2025, over three million strike drones had been delivered across all channels.

The integrating mechanism. The Army of Drones Bonus programme ties all four layers together. Soldiers upload evidence of enemy target destruction to DELTA, which verifies kills and credits units with points. Units spend those points through Brave1 Market, which hosts the certified product catalogue. The Defence Procurement Agency fulfils the orders through DOT-Chain Defence. Resource allocation tracks demonstrated combat effectiveness in near-real-time, manufacturers receive direct demand signal from end users, and the state retains full audit transparency through Prozorro. No NATO member has anything comparable.

2.2 The outputs

The capabilities produced by this stack have begun to exceed what the established Western defence-industrial base can offer at comparable cost. Ukrainian drone interceptors, reportedly costing between £1,500 and £4,000 per unit, are credited with intercepting up to ninety per cent of the Iranian-designed Shahed and Russian-designed Geran-2 attack drones launched at Ukrainian cities. The cost contrast is decisive: a £3 million Patriot interceptor or a £400,000 AIM-9X Sidewinder is an irrational economic exchange against a £40,000 Shahed, and the air-defence doctrine of every country facing Iranian-pattern drone threat must now reflect this arithmetic.

The export trajectory has accelerated accordingly. In March 2026 President Zelensky signed ten-year security partnerships with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, at those states' specific request, for drone defence cooperation and co-production. Twenty-plus agreements with European defence manufacturers were signed in 2025, almost twice the number in 2023. The European Commission has approved a £1.4 billion programme to integrate Ukrainian defence industry with European supply chains. One NATO country is in active negotiation to purchase DELTA under an intergovernmental agreement.

These outcomes are the visible surface of institutional architecture that was largely invisible before 2022. Countries considering adoption are typically drawn to the surface — the drones, the interceptors, the battle-management software — without recognising that the architecture underneath is the thing that makes the surface sustainable. A country that purchases DELTA without adopting the architectural principles that produced DELTA will own a static snapshot of a system that is continuing to evolve elsewhere.