Ukraine and Germany are starting work on plans for the joint production of advanced drones and other battle-tested defense systems, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday during a visit to Berlin as Kyiv looks to scale up its more than four-year fight against Russia’s all-out invasion. The arrangement puts state power, military industry, and wartime financing at the center of a conflict that keeps grinding ordinary people down while leaders talk in the language of capacity, support, and deterrence.
Who Has the Power
Zelenskyy said at a joint news conference with Chancellor Friedrich Merz that Ukraine had proposed to Germany a bilateral drone deal covering various types of drones, missiles, software and modern defense systems, and that their teams were starting concrete work. Merz said Germany’s commitment to supporting Kyiv’s war effort was “a very clear signal” to Russia and said, “We will not waver in our efforts to defend Ukraine.”
The language is all statecraft and weapons production, with the public kept far from the decisions. What is being built is not a grassroots defense network but a cross-border military-industrial project, with governments and their teams moving first and everyone else expected to absorb the consequences.
U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to end Russia’s war on its neighbor have recently petered out as the Iran war grips the Trump administration’s attention, although Tammy Bruce, the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told the U.N. Security Council on Monday that Washington “will continue to push for a negotiated and durable end” to the war. The promise of negotiation sits alongside the reality of a war machine that keeps expanding its reach.
Russia has occupied about 20% of Ukraine so far, including the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized in 2014. That occupation remains the backdrop for every new weapons deal, every new pledge, every new round of elite coordination.
Who Pays for the War Economy
Zelenskyy said Ukraine has the capacity to produce twice as much military equipment as it is currently deploying, but lacks funding to step up production. “We simply don’t have enough money,” he said. He said a key to unlocking that potential lies in obtaining a promised loan of 90 billion euros ($106 billion) from the European Union, which had been held up by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, but his impending departure from office after a weekend election could now free up the money. Merz said Ukraine needs those funds “urgently.”
The hierarchy is plain: the capacity exists, the machinery exists, but the money gate sits above it all. Production is not limited by need or labor, but by access to the funds controlled through European institutions and political bargaining. The people expected to endure the war are also the ones waiting on loans, approvals, and the shifting priorities of governments.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who accompanied Zelenskyy to Berlin, said Germany and Ukraine agreed a defense package valued at 4 billion euros ($4.7 billion). Fedorov said on X that the agreement is “a massive boost” for Ukraine’s air defense against Russian barrages, allowing Kyiv to buy “several hundred” American-made Patriot missiles. After Berlin, Zelenskyy was due to visit Norway, another important financial and military ally, while defense leaders from the 50-plus partner nations who regularly gather to coordinate weapons aid for Kyiv were to hold an online meeting Wednesday, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said.
That is the architecture of the war economy: partner nations, defense leaders, packages, and purchases. The public gets the bill and the fallout while the institutions coordinate the flow of weapons.
What the Frontline Looks Like
Kyiv is heavily reliant on U.S. intelligence for targeting inside Russia and needs more sophisticated American-made air defense systems to stop Russian missile attacks on its power grid. If the Iran war drags on, it could erode vital U.S. support for Kyiv, Zelenskyy fears. The war is not only fought with drones and missiles, but with dependence on outside intelligence and foreign military supply chains.
Furthermore, the Ukrainian army is short-handed, facing around 200,000 troop desertions and draft-dodging by around 2 million people, Fedorov said in January. Germany will help Kyiv facilitate the return home of Ukrainian men of military age, Merz said. “We need rapid, tangible progress here,” he said. The demand for “progress” lands on bodies, movement, and coercion, not on the people who set the terms from Berlin.
Domestically developed unmanned platforms are playing a vital role in holding back Russia’s invasion. Ukraine makes air and sea drones, missiles that have reached around 1,750 kilometers (1,000 miles) into Russia, as well as battlefield robots that help make up for its troop shortage. Ukraine has been approached about security cooperation, especially battle-tested drone production, by eight Middle East and Gulf countries, as well as Turkey, Iraq and countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, Zelenskyy said on Monday.
Despite its handicaps, Western analysts and officials say Ukraine has in recent months recorded battlefield successes against Russia’s bigger army, disrupting a spring offensive started by Russia amid improving weather, as fields dry out and new foliage on tree lines offers more cover. Meanwhile, the long-range drones and missiles that Kyiv designs and produces are repeatedly striking oil facilities and manufacturing plants deep inside Russia. Ukraine “is in a much better place than it has been at any stage in this horrific war,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Monday. Ukraine “is on top from a military perspective,” Stubb said, noting that last month Ukraine fired more drones and missiles at Russia than vice versa. Moscow has also claimed progress on the battlefield, and independent verification of each side’s claims wasn’t possible.
Civilian Cost, State Logic
A Russian missile attack on the eastern Ukraine city of Dnipro killed four people and left 21 hospitalized with injuries, 10 of them in serious condition, regional authorities said Tuesday. The city’s attorney general’s office said the victims, all civilians, were driving or walking past the scene of the strike in the city, 485 kilometers (300 miles) southeast of Kyiv. Elsewhere, a 52-year-old woman was killed in a Russian drone strike in the southern city of Kherson that also left one man seriously wounded, authorities said.
Those deaths and injuries sit beneath the diplomatic choreography in Berlin and the weapons coordination across Europe. While leaders announce packages, loans, and production plans, civilians in Dnipro and Kherson are the ones who pay in blood for the machinery of war.
The article was written by Kirsten Grieshaber and Hanna Arhirova. Grieshaber is a Berlin-based reporter covering Germany and Austria for The Associated Press, and Arhirova is an Associated Press reporter covering Ukraine based in Kyiv.