Employees of secret defense enterprises are carefully checked to avoid infiltration by Russian informants, journalists report.
The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, started the restoration and repurposing of the defense industry almost from scratch. Such a course is aimed at reducing dependence on foreign aid and turning the country into a powerful center for the production of weapons and ammunition for Western countries. Alberto Rojas, columnist of the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, told journalists about this.
He believes that Ukraine is waging several wars at the same time. One of them is the "war of the past", which includes thousands of artillery fire and attacks from one trench to another. The other is the modern "war of today", which takes place with the help of drones, which have become "masters of the sky and the sea". Between these two wars, the "war of the future" continues.
Rojas claims that a network of classified underground factories has been created in Ukraine. According to him, Oleksandr Kamyshin, Minister of Strategic Industries, is responsible for this process.
According to the publication's sources, various types of drones are produced in Ukraine, including sea and land, Kozak armored personnel carriers, Neptune missiles, and Stugna anti-tank complexes. Production volumes have tripled since 2023.
"Last year, we focused on the development of aerial drones for attacks in the rear of Russia, and we are already successfully implementing this. The Magura naval drone has sunk five Russian ships and is keeping their military fleet in port. Also this year we are improving ground drones. We already have rescue and attack drones in development, and our teams are testing and improving them on the front lines," an anonymous source told the publication.
According to one of the experts, the West was not ready for a war of this scale, with such losses and expenditure of ammunition.
“All arsenals are being emptied because more artillery shells are being wasted on the battlefield than all the allies combined can produce. We calculated that the West urgently needs 7 million shells. We are already producing Soviet-caliber ammunition for our guns, and soon we will be able to export NATO-caliber as well," El Mundo quotes the expert as saying.
He explained that Ukraine lacks money and contracts, and Europe lacks factories.
"We have the experience and resources to produce what they want in a much shorter time than any other European factory," the expert said.
Among the successfully developing projects is the "FrankenRamstein" project (a combination of the words Frankenstein and Ramstein — a German city where meetings of Ukraine and its allies are organized — ed.).
Rojas explains that Ukraine was equipped with launchers of the same type, but did not have missiles. In contrast, for the other type of missile launchers, there were many, but no launchers themselves. Therefore, the Ukrainians adapted existing assets to NATO formats and created launchers and missiles that can now use these old surpluses, which gave rise to the name "FrankenRamstein".
At the end of the article, the author notes that Ukraine built an industry and adapted Western weapons to Soviet systems using methods that no one would give a penny to. Currently, Ukrainians are most concerned about these plants being completely secret from Russia. Employees are carefully checked to avoid the infiltration of informants from the Russian Federation, because "traitors" have already been identified.
