The State Enterprise of the Ministry of Defense “Defense Procurement Agency” demonstrated an unprecedented pace of contracting foreign-made unmanned aerial vehicles. In just one week of February, the amount of concluded agreements exceeded the indicators of the most active months of last year, which indicates a radical change in approaches to providing the front with the necessary equipment.
This was reported by the publication “Our Money,” informs the portal PromPolitInform.
According to the analysis of the published data, in the period from February 14 to February 21, the Agency concluded contracts for the supply of Chinese drones for a total amount of 9.37 billion hryvnias. This figure was an absolute record for the entire existence of the institution. Journalists note that earlier the volume of contracts for a whole month was much more modest.
Even the traditional December peak of purchases in 2025, when departments usually master the balance of budget funds, turned out to be one and a half times less than the results of only one week in February 2026.
The rapid growth of procurement capacities coincided with personnel changes in the leadership of the defense department. After Mikhail Fedorov took the post of minister in mid-January 2026, the Defense Procurement Agency as a whole contracted Chinese equipment for 11.4 billion hryvnias.
This is actually equal to the entire volume of similar purchases for the second half of 2025, which indicates a significant acceleration of bureaucratic processes and the priority of this direction.
In the reports that appeared in the Prozorro system, most of the information remains confidential for security reasons – all details are closed in the contracts, except for the final price. However, the cost of some models of drones still became known.
In particular, the price of popular models Matrice 4T fixed at about 188 thousand hryvnia per unit, while the model Matrice 4E costs the budget an average of 141 thousand hryvnia.
Such activation in the foreign market takes place against the background of the constant need of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in means of aerial reconnaissance and strike drones.
Large-scale injections of funds into the purchase of equipment of Chinese origin emphasize the strategy of rapid saturation of units with solutions available on the market, while domestic production continues to increase its own capacities.
Market experts attribute these changes to the new management approach in the Ministry of Defense, which is focused on digitalization and maximum simplification of procedures for the purchase of technological goods.
Further dynamics will depend on the stability of budget financing and the ability of supply chains to ensure uninterrupted supply of such a quantity of equipment to Ukraine.
Photo – from open sources
