2025-04-23
8 分钟The Economist Hello, Rosie Bloor here,
co-host of The Intelligence, our daily news and current affairs podcast.
You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist read aloud.
We hope you enjoy it.
Behind the nondescript facade of a light industrial building in Kiev,
an eclectic crew of video gamers,
architects,
scientists and filmmakers is mass producing deep strike drones and cruise missiles.
They do not look like old-style defence types, but they are transforming Ukraine's war.
Three years ago they were making 30 drones a month.
Now they are up to 1,300 a month, ranging from slow drones,
$580,000 for a set of 10, to a new ballistic missile at $1 million apiece.
They cost a fraction of what foreign ones do, and are based on open source designs,
meaning that they are not bound by foreign usage restrictions.
We don't want to have any dependence on America's politics,"
says the firm's founder, whose name cannot be disclosed for security reasons.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022,
Ukraine's warfighting effort utterly depended on American and European supplies.
Yet over the past three years,
its own military manufacturing capacity has gone from $1 billion to $35 billion worth of material per year.