Inside a Drone Factory in Ukraine
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You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. In the war between Russia and Ukraine, drones have been a key component for both sides ever since Russia's full-scale invasion over three years ago. And because of this, Ukraine is at the cutting edge of drone innovation. Last year, they churned out some two million UAVs, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

These UAVs are large and small, and they're coming out of high-tech factories as well as smaller budget producers. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley takes us inside one drone-making operation in Kiev. In a courtyard surrounded by apartment blocks in Kiev, we walk down some stairs to a tiny basement flat. There's three big dogs who live here. All around are tables, chairs.

Full of drone parts and tools and tweezers and pliers. So these are the drone dogs. It's our security. That's Andriy Yuhno, who supervises this FPV, that's first-person view, attack drone-making operation.

The windows are covered with paper, but cracked open, we hear children playing. You have a playground here? No, not playground. Kindergarten. Kindergarten.

You're making drones right outside of a kindergarten. Yeah, but we don't show our drones for children. Yukno says he got into drone making because he felt he just had to do something when the war started. We started with the delivery in Kiev. Food, medicine, what people need. And we start with this.

bigger, bigger, bigger. He used to be a barista. Everyone here seems to have had another existence before the full-scale invasion. I'm super new here. I'm still training. 30-year-old Kristina Pashenko recently left her job helping companies appear higher in Internet searches because she said she wanted to do something that mattered. Now she's soldering wires to a circuit board. A thin wisp of smoke rises from her soldering wand. Now I feel better.

super excited and a little bit proud of myself even that I can do something useful. Pashenko says the videos of thanks from soldiers on the front lines using their drones are hugely motivating. The commander of Ukraine's ground forces says drones struck and destroyed 22% more Russian targets in February than January, with first-person view drones leading the way. Thank you.

One of Ukraine's most successful drone makers, Vuri, recently celebrated its first 1,100% Ukrainian-sourced drones with a media event. CEO Oleksii Babenko says it's important to be self-sufficient. From the start of this war...

Every time when Ukraine needs something, we need to ask it a lot of time. So only one way, how we can stay strong, it's only all that we make in Ukraine. So it's only Ukrainian soldiers, it's only Ukrainian manufacturers. Russia is a couple months behind Ukraine in drone innovation, but has much bigger production capacity, says Oleksandr Kamyshin, advisor to President Zelensky on Strategic Affairs. He calls it a

technological race. Once you've got a technology, other side tries to counter this technology and then you have to find another solution and then another side tries to counter it. It's a constant war of innovations and war of technologies.

Back in the basement drone shop, the dogs open their eyes wide, uneasy as the team tests a drone in a metal cylindrical frame in the center of the room that allows it to fly, twist and flip. 37-year-old Sasha Potashnik was a dancer before the full-scale invasion. He says he's making drones to help end this war on the best terms Ukraine can get.

We've got to be more realistic. Of course I'd like to get all of our land back. But from the beginning, we exaggerated our capacity and we are fighting a very big enemy. We must be sober. Most sobering, says Petashnik, is that Ukraine's biggest ally, the U.S., may be abandoning his country. Originally, I'm a scientist.

Part-time drone maker Oleh Halaidich has just sat down at his workstation. This scientist with a doctorate in the study of stem cells says making drones is probably the quickest, most impactful way of helping Ukraine. I think many of people who come from art, culture, science, they feel that this is a time of some different decisions. Science is slow, he says, and we need to do something to protect ourselves right now. Eleanor Beardsley in Pyarnews, Kyiv.

That's the state of the world from NPR. Thanks for listening. This is Ira Glass, the host of This American Life. So much is changing so rapidly right now with President Trump in office. It feels good to pause for a moment sometimes and look around at what's what. To try and do that, we've been finding these incredible stories about right now that are funny and have feeling and you get to see people everywhere making sense of this new America that we find ourselves in.

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