Nearly 4,000 FPV UAVs are being produced per day, Russian minister of defence claims. Pictured is an FPV UAV used by Russian Ground Forces, deployed in Dnepr, Ukraine, on 27 July 2024. (Russian Ministry of Defence)
Russia is producing nearly 4,000 first-person-view (FPV) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) per day, Russian Minister of Defence Andrei Belousov announced to troops at the Moscow Military District on 30 July.
Production has accelerated following a mandate from Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2022 to scale the development of UAVs. Under this mandate, the Russian Ministry of Defence published a list of 28 instructions, containing orders for the serial production of UAVs and their components, development of necessary infrastructure, training of personnel, and stimulating demand for domestic production.
Following this, in June 2023 Putin instructed the development of support centres for the design, testing, and production of UAVs, supported by the government and the ANO ‘Platform of the National Technology Initiative'. The centres are based in Moscow, St Petersburg, Sevastopol, Nizhny Novgorod, Ryazan, Samara, Sakhalin, Tomsk, and Tula, as well as in Bashkiria and Tatarstan. Putin also instructed scaling production of the Lancet and Zala KYB one-way UAVs (known colloquially as Cube).
Russia's UAV production capacity benefits from a large, domestic industrial infrastructure. By concentrating on the large-scale manufacturing of a specific system, they can expedite production without the constraints imposed by intellectual property and commercial sensitivities, Lieutenant Colonel Haydn Gaukroger, Unmanned Systems Programme lead for Ukraine at the UK Ministry of Defence, previously told Janes .
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