In Ukraine, in the “secret factories” of drones to defeat Russia: “300 euros and a 3D printer, life or death is at stake here”

FROM CORRECT
Kiev – Vlad did well in school in the 1980s, he passed all the elections and got into the Baumanka. He, a boy from the province, is at the Moscow State Technical University: the second oldest in the country, named after the Bolshevik revolutionary Nikolai Bauman. From there came the engineer of the first civilian supersonic aircraft Andrei Tupolev, the inventor of the first nuclear power plant Vladimir Shukhov. It was like getting into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston coming from the Midwest, if you were American.

Exactly that Vlad was from Kiev. He entered Baumanka as a model Soviet student, and left as a Ukrainian. The country he grew up in no longer existed. And his real name is not Vlad, for that matter, why now he is one of many players in the growing arms industry that helps keep Ukraine on its feet after nearly three years of total Russian aggression. It is essential – he says – that his identity cannot be recreated.

He himself was born in a completely Russian Krasnodar family, which settled in the decades of Soviet history in Kiev. He still pronounces the names of Ukrainian cities that Moscow now pronounces in the Russian way: “Zaporozhye,” he says, not Zaporizhzhia. His father, an engineer, with a poor salary after the dissolution of the USSR, left back to Krasnodar to cultivate the land. Vlad worked with him in Russia for two years, interrupting the university, and then he returned to Baumanka, graduated and started his career as an engineer. Back to Kiev, though.

Officially, today Vlad is just the CEO of a subsidiary of a Western multinational corporation; but for almost a year some offices, staff and extra time at the Ukrainian headquarters of the multinational organization have been secretly for making FPV model drones («first person view») to send to the army. “I couldn’t stand by and watch – he says – I had to do something. ” He added money equal to approx 60 thousand euros of their personal savings for aluminum, batteries, motors, cameras, as well as five 3D printers which now lives without stopping, making drone parts, lined up along the wall in one of the company’s offices on the outskirts of Kiev. It is inevitable that the parent company in a far western country does not know: while the accounts rise at the end of the year.

Vlad today lives in Irpin, the elegant suburbs of Kiev from where the Russians tried to enter the capital with armed fire from February 25, 2022: in a month of battle in his area they killed hundreds of civilians, destroyed the entire energy grid, destroyed seven out of ten homes, including his. In those days he went into the trenches. “My military experience was failing, I got sick after a week,” he says. “I called my father in Russia, told him what was happening. He said to me: ‘Stay away from the Americans and nothing will happen to you.’ My father has a large television in the living room: I believe that it is impossible for the human mind to resist when a river of propaganda hits you every evening.”

With his experience, Vlad has transformed traditional FPV drones into something more efficient: take out each cost around 300 euros, but they are bigger, they go faster, they can only carry three more four kilos of explosives with which they throw themselves at the targets.

It may not be enough for Ukraine – certainly not on its own, without further help from the West – but this artisanal and technological transformation of several industries in the most hidden places is helping the country to stay alive. To fight for every meter of land.

In the past two years, the production of Ukrainian military drones has gone from zero to two million pieces per yearhas emerged from 250 companies that did not exist before. Perhaps this is why, among the points of his “victory plan”, Volodymyr Zelensky includes the support that Ukraine itself can give to the European defense industry. This drones of all kinds are made now: from suicide bombers like the ones that come out of Vlad’s offices, to bombers from 25 thousand dollars each, to great display pieces which cost up to two hundred thousand dollars.

All this means a constant, creative, ferocious search for innovation.

In a group of shacks in another suburb of Kiev, where silk was worked in Soviet times, a group of graduates has set up a start-up with one goal: to prevent the Russians from hitting the radio signals thanks to the Ukrainian soldiers driving. drones. «We tweak the receivers, we reduce the radio frequency, after a while they find the signal again and disturb it again; then we will change again,” says one of them, Alastair. “It is a pursuit of movements and counter-movements, trials in which the life or death of our people is at stake.”.

There are six of them in two rooms. They were sound engineers, software developers, antenna technicians. Today they have already sent a thousand new radio receivers to the front and are waiting for a piece of paper: the “certificate” from the Ministry of Defense that recognizes their place in the military industry and ‘ promise that they will not be hired and sent to the front.

But that promise is true. In one corner they are a castle of five lithium batteries cannibalized from old electric Toyotasas many people are now doing in Ukraine. This is why the country has become a major importer of used Asian cars. “The batteries guarantee us 24 hours of energy in the event of a total blackout in Kiev – explained Alexander -. We can’t compromise 3D printers.” The six describe their community of technologists serving the war effort as a “self-sustaining, isolated ecosystem.” And they are against rest: “A frozen war is the worst situation – says Alexander – It does not give us a future, we would be paralyzed without being able to dream for the future, for our children.”.

Something similar is also in the minds of the founders of Tencore, five guys associated with each other to create and produce a terrestrial drone. Terms. AND remotely controlled crawler, about two and a half meters of steel, antennas, semiconductors. He gets wounded men out of the forest, carries a 12.7 caliber machine gun towards the enemy and opens fire. With artificial intelligence, it can protect open areas by targeting anything that moves. Roman, one of the participants, explains that each piece costs 10 thousand dollars and they only made twenty of themare sold to individual brigades who submit bids from their budgets. But the provision of the Ministry of Defense seems difficult. Some in Kiev complain that they are threatened by corruption.

Vlad, in his multinational office, explains that he sends drones to the front to anyone who requests them. He doesn’t know where either. He has not called his father this month, he admits. “I wouldn’t know what to say to him.” He has not even spoken to his brother for a while, a doctor from Krasnodar has now been sent from Russia to a hospital in Crimea. “We were very close as children,” he says. Vlad gets up to pour himself a cup of coffee, then another and another. He does not want to show that he is crying.