| | | Ukraine’s Plan to Starve the Russian War Machine
Negotiations have stalled. Trump keeps changing his policies. Ukrainians, backed by Europeans, are taking matters into their own hands. ???
By Anne Applebaum
September 24, 2025, 3:25 PM ET
In one section of a sprawling warehouse in central Ukraine, workers have stacked what appear to be small airplane wings in neat rows. In another section, a group of men is huddled around what looks like the body of an aircraft, adjusting an electronic panel. In makeshift locations elsewhere in Ukraine, workers are producing these electronic panels from scratch: This company wants to use as few imported parts as possible, avoiding anything American, anything Chinese. Jewelers, I was told, have turned out to be well suited for this kind of finicky manufacturing. Ukraine’s justly celebrated manicurists are good at it too.
They are not alone in being new to the job. Everyone in this factory had a different profession three years ago, because this factory did not exist three years ago. Nor did the Ukrainian drone industry, of which it forms part. Whatever their job description before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, everyone at this production site is now part of a major shift in the politics and economics of the war, one that hasn’t been fully understood by all of Ukraine’s allies.
Once almost entirely dependent on imports of weapons from abroad, the Ukrainians are now producing millions of drones, large and small, as well as.....
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