On the menu today: A chat with the Ukrainian ambassador to Poland reveals that the government in Kyiv now finds itself with more drones than it needs in certain areas. The Ukrainian government also enthusiastically approves of the Trump administration’s moves regarding Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. Elsewhere in Europe, the Germans are setting the goal of building the most powerful conventional army in Europe, which raises the question of just who the Trump administration wants to see running Germany in the future. Read on.
Spare Drones in a War Zone
Warsaw, Poland — For a man representing a country still fighting off a full-scale invasion for the fifth year, Vasyl Bodnar, Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland, can find promising signs of a transformed landscape in the war. With the U.S. war against Iran demonstrating the terror that Shahed drones can inflict upon civilian populations, suddenly every country on earth wants to build its own anti-drone defenses, and fast. And no country has spent more time fighting off drone attacks than Ukraine, and no country has more expertise, experience, production lines . . . or, believe it or not, more extra drones lying around.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced last year that Ukraine was pursuing joint weapons production agreements with Canada, Denmark, Germany, Lithuania, Norway, and the United Kingdom. In April, Ukraine signed ten-year defense export agreements with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. As mentioned yesterday, Poland is trading nine decommissioned MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine in exchange for some unspecified assistance with drone technology.
Kyiv has said that the US is seeking the transfer of technology and access to intellectual property rights from Ukraine as part of a drone deal that is awaiting approval at the highest political level, a person familiar with the matter said.
The US Department of Defense has asked to test a range of Ukrainian defense products, including drones and electronic warfare systems, as Washington is considering their potential purchase for military use, the official said. The agreement has not been finalized, the person added, speaking on condition of anonymity because the discussions are private.
Growing interest from the US shows how the world’s largest military is looking to tap into the drone expertise that Ukraine has acquired over four years fighting against the Russian invasion. Through a combination of new technology and tactics, Kyiv’s forces have been able to strike deep into Russia territory, to slow and in some cases even reverse battlefield gains by Moscow’s bigger army, and to inflict significant damage on oil facilities that help finance the Kremlin’s war machine.
(Hey, do you remember a bit more than a year ago, someone loudly insisting that Ukraine didn’t have any cards?)
“In the beginning of the war, we were asking for everything, because we were lacking everything,” Bodnar recalled. “We were traditionally, a peaceful country who had nothing to fight with. . . . Here at the embassy, we have an officer of the border guard who had been in the surroundings of the city of Sumy fighting for a couple of weeks without [enough] ammunition, without any supplies, just like a partisan group. They organized attacks on the Russians, and were fighting, even without any orders.”
That early desperation prompted a lot of Ukrainians in and out of uniform to start experimenting with off-the-shelf, commercially available recreational drones and jury-rigging them to drop grenades on Russian positions. “It was a completely new, an unbureaucratic approach,” Bodnar said. “Businesses that yesterday had been creating kitchens, cooking things, started making drones. They started from small innovations, which are now widely used on the front line.”
Ukraine was one of the scientific, engineering, and manufacturing cornerstones of the old Soviet Union; during one stretch, Ukraine was producing around half of all the USSR’s tanks and missiles. Even for the generation after the Cold War, the country churned out about 130,000 engineering graduates annually, which adds up to a lot of highly motivated engineering minds thinking up new ways to fly over to the enemy undetected and eliminate them.
Over four years of nonstop trial-and-error and ingenuity under the pressure of an invading army along with the construction of specialized facilities (see past reporting from drone factories in Ukraine here and here) have turned Ukraine into the drone supplier to the world.
“We now have, to some extent, overproduction of drones,” Bodnar said. “For example, Magura drones, which is a sea drone, they practically demolished the Russian fleet in the Black Sea. But we don’t have a target now for them. So, it’s possible to sell them abroad, as well as with the FPV [first person view] drones. So, the production is now more than 4 million per year.” (That’s all kinds of drones, not just sea or FPV ones.) Last month, Ukraine announced that it was on pace to produce 7 million drones this year.
Back in March, President Trump scoffed regarding Ukraine, “We don’t need their help in drone defense. We know more about drones than anybody.”
It’s odd to hear Trump speak so dismissively of the Ukrainians, because the Ukrainians are big fans of what Trump is doing in some parts of the rest of the world. Asked about the administration’s capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and placing of additional pressure on Cuba, Bodnar smiled, “To be blunt, we are happy with that.” And the Ukrainians are happy to see every blow that the U.S. and Israel strike against the Iranian mullahs.
“Iran is our enemy,” Bodnar declared firmly. “They have sold Russians this technology for Shahed drone production, and now it is the most terrible weapon for the civilians. But it’s useless on the front line. You couldn’t attack a target because it’s too easily shot down. But the civilian cities are attacked by hundreds of these drones. They are suffering the most from these terrible night attacks.”
In the parking lot behind the embassy, the Ukrainians have a captured Shahed drone that was disassembled and shipped here.
“Our society understands the value of freedom,” Bodnar continued. “We have only 35 years of statehood, but we have been a nation for more than a thousand years. It was an impetus from inside. The people understand that it is theirs. It is my home, I’m defending it.”
For those wondering how the Ukrainians can find the strength to fight on after more than four years of war, the simple answer is that they don’t have any choice. It is either fight on, or watch more of their country endure the nightmare that is living under Russian occupation — indiscriminate attacks against civilians, systematic torture, mass rape, and the forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia — a demonic swath of war crimes that some contend meets the definition of an attempted genocide.
“There are many problems in Ukraine,” Bodnar conceded. “We are not a 100 percent pure society, which has everything resolved. We have corruption, we are fighting that. We have our problems inside, but there is also a unity inside. The enemy is terrible, so we have two choices, and it is visible for the Ukrainian society: We either die in the battlefield, or we die in the concentration camp. Sometimes — maybe it is not direct, but sometimes it is like Israel. Either you are fighting and you may live, or you are dying in either a jail or a concentration camp.”
Wait, Which Party Is Our Administration Touting in Germany?
Germany is rearming, and last month the German government announced plans to become the strongest conventional army in Europe by 2039. This is a goal that the Trump administration broadly supports, because they want our European NATO allies to become less dependent upon the U.S. for security.
Simultaneously, the Trump administration has become a surprisingly outspoken defender of the German far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland, known by its initials AfD. In February 2025, JD Vance met with Alice Weidel, the AfD co-leader and the party’s candidate for chancellor. In September 2025, Weidel came to Washington and met with officials from the U.S. National Security Council, the State Department, and Vance’s office. In February, an AfD member of the German Bundestag met with Pentagon officials.
The AfD is not so enthusiastic about NATO membership and has argued that NATO isn’t considering Russia’s interests. Weidel spent six years living in the People’s Republic of China and worked for the state-owned Bank of China. The AfD remain vehement opponents of the U.S. military campaign against Iran.
Now, it’s entirely fine to want a stronger Germany that can play a greater role in the defense of Europe from outside threats. But it’s a little odd to want a stronger Germany and to be supporting a far-right party that doesn’t like the country’s current alliance with America, and whose leaders always seem to have a good word to say about Russia, China, and Iran.
Wait, it gets worse.
Back in June 2023, Weidel boasted that her party was the most popular party in “central Germany . . .” referring to the territory that we in the U.S. used to call “East Germany.”
Now, look at a map of Europe, and see what is to the east of the old “East Germany,” or German Democratic Republic, and what would be considered the eastern part of Germany if you considered East Germany to be “central Germany.”
As a senior Polish official put it to me this week, “We’ve seen this movie before, and we don’t like how it ends.”
ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, an account of my trip to the “efficient” border fence that Poland built to stop the Russan-enabled “weaponized migration” coming through Belarus. (Make sure you check out the photo credit.) I have not had many reporting trips that have required helmets, plate carriers, and balaclavas. And yes, the U.S. reporters that I am traveling with made a lot of jokes about wearing our baklavas.