Ukraine wants the U.S. to sign a major drone production agreement, but there’s some unexplained foot-dragging.
Back in March, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine is awaiting White House approval for a deal that was proposed by the Ukrainian government last year. You may have noticed a lot of drones flying around in the Middle East; since the start of the conflict, the Iranians have fired at least 5,000 drones at targets in Israel, at U.S. bases in the Middle East, oil tankers, port facilities, energy infrastructure, etc.
And yet, for some inexplicable reason, nothing’s happening on that drone deal. No one seems to have a good sense of what the problem or holdup is. From The Hill:
But even with senior Pentagon officials — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll — lauding Kyiv’s drone abilities, the Trump administration is still biding its time on taking full advantage of the Ukrainian capabilities, a delay that experts say is potentially kneecapping the U.S. military.
“I don’t know what the hang-up would be in denying ourselves the ability to take advantage of that. I don’t think there’s any good reason,” Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, said of Ukraine’s drone capabilities.
“I don’t know if there is a hang-up, I don’t know if there’s a different view between people about what the process needs to be, or what needs to come first, but clearly there is a great advantage on the U.S. side to partnering with Ukraine on drones,” she told The Hill.
Likewise, Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow with Brookings Institution, said he was “mystified” by the lack of a deal given that the U.S. has been trying to learn from Ukraine, including by sending teams to the country to study developments on the ground. . . .
One former official who spoke to The Hill on the condition of anonymity made a more blunt assessment, calling the hold-up “lethargy” on the part of the Trump administration and “a certain amount of hostility towards Ukraine coming from the very top.”
A whole lot of countries are pouring a whole lot of resources into developing both offensive drone capabilities and anti-drone air defense, including interceptor drones. But no one has had more experience fighting off drone attacks and making long-range drone strikes over the past four and a half years than the Ukrainians. And for some types of drones, the Ukrainians literally have more drones than they know what to do with.
It would be astonishingly stupid for the United States to not take advantage of every opportunity to improve its capabilities in both air offense and air defense. And it would be jaw-droppingly bang-your-head-on-the-desk stupid for the U.S. to drag its feet on a useful deal because of “a certain amount of hostility towards Ukraine coming from the very top.”
Back on March 3, 2025, I wrote that with the arrival of Trump’s second term, the United States had effectively switched sides in the Ukraine–Russia war. I would really like to be proven wrong in that statement, but on a regular basis, we see the administration bending over backwards to give Vladimir Putin’s Russia the benefit of the doubt, and a reflexive hostility to Ukraine so pervasive, we won’t even accept assistance when it is offered.