In the two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s home-grown defence tech – especially drones – has kept the country going.
ADVERTISEMENT“Instead of using human capital, let’s use autonomous vehicles because it will save our lives,” said Ivan Kaunov, co-founder of start-up Finmap turned officer in Ukraine’s army.
“That’s the main change that I see on the battlefield since the very beginning,” he told Euronews Next ahead of the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of its neighbour.
Speaking from an undisclosed location in a car, Kaunov, who serves in the army and develops drone technologies, says defence technology has become essential to the fight.
The start-up co-founder graduated from the military department at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2012 and at the beginning of the war, he was an officer in the ground forces.
“I was the second person in command of 110 people and went to line zero (the farthest edge of the front lines) and had some personal close combat experience,” Kaunov said.
“But then in the summer of 2022, I had a serious concussion,” he added, an injury which forced him to spend a few months in rehabilitation. He was then moved to another department of the army that he cannot disclose.
“Since that time, I learned how to work with more than 25 different ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) long-range drones from various countries”.
The drone war
Drones are “absolutely crucial” in the war, according to Kaunov. While there are the kamikaze and explosive drones that attack the enemy, intelligence drones that can provide information in real-time from enemy territory are important too.
Without the latter, he said, you cannot actually strike the enemy’s headquarters or ammunition warehouses with long-range artillery systems as you are “blind”.
Another reason drones are so important in the war is they are relatively cheap to make and can make an impact when destroying the opponent’s expensive military weapons.
“If we can destroy something which cost millions [with] something that cost hundreds of dollars, that’s how we’re going to win this war,” Kaunov said.
With his battlefield experience and knowledge of drones, he co-founded his latest company Buntar Aerospace, which digitalises first-hand experience from the battlefield into both hardware and software solutions for long-range ISR drones.
It helps to plan missions and manages real-time video broadcasting in areas that are jammed due to electronic warfare.
“We have to accept the reality that we have a huge enemy here on our border. And this enemy doesn’t just want us to leave, he wants to vanish us as a nation,” Kaunov said.
“So we have to defend ourselves. That means we have to rebuild lots of different things to manage it all. And I believe it will be done”.
But drones do have their drawbacks. For them to complete a task, they must have a stable connection between the control panel and the drone itself.
They can also be easily detected as they emit frequencies into the air.
“Around the world, the main manufacturers of components for drones make modules for them developed on the same components,” said Serhii Titkov, an inventor and developer of Kseonics Technology.
ADVERTISEMENTHe created the DDSR1 drone detector, which detects enemy drones in Ukraine.
“They have a limited number of communication channels, and if the video connection is analogue, they do not have any encryption, and the video signal is available to anyone who has standard and commercially available video receivers,” he told Euronews Next.
This means the drones can become jammed and tracked by enemies.
The only way to overcome this, he said, is by producing control and video transmitters using expensive imported components, or by equipping the drone with a machine vision system, where the operator fixes his target before radio interference occurs, and the drone flies to it on autopilot.
The funding issue
This is expensive to do, and Ukrainian defence tech start-ups say they need more funding.
ADVERTISEMENT“I hope that manufacturers of electronic chips designed for telemetry will join in supporting Ukraine and develop chips that can significantly help Ukrainians in confronting the aggressor [to] gain a technological advantage,” said Titkov.
He said the company has lots of ideas for new developments that they plan to mass-produce, which requires not only funding but also good specialists.
He hopes Ukraine will this year see “a peaceful sky, a quiet life, a victory, and for new technologies to be used only for medicine, fighting hunger, and building alternative energy sources and the environment”.
Despite Ukraine’s government initiatives, such as Brave1, a defence tech coordination platform that this year has a budget of more than $39 million (€36 million) to award to tech companies, funding is the biggest headache.
This is in part because investment lifecycles in defence tech are much longer than those of regular start-ups.
ADVERTISEMENT“Investors are sometimes afraid because they have pre-agreed [funding] life cycles. So, like three years of investments and in defence tech, it is not so fast,” said Daria Yaniieva, head of our start-ups division at Ukrainian IT company Sigma Software.
But she said defence tech should be treated like any other start-up or company when it comes to investing, and she is confident there are returns on these investments.
“What we see in Ukrainian defence tech, is that the solutions that are born [on] the battlefield, they are actually tailored for the new era,” she told Euronews Next.
“And this is where Ukraine can take the stage… So in terms of the investments, this is a sweet spot for everyone”.
Investing in Ukraine’s tech ecosystem is also helping to keep the country’s economy afloat.
ADVERTISEMENTLast year, the tech sector contributed 4.9 per cent or €6.5 billion to Ukraine’s GDP, according to Lviv IT Cluster.
The number of Ukrainians working in the tech sector has also increased by over 7 per cent.
‘Not just about weapons’
Investors are also cautious about defence tech as they believe it is just about killing machines, which is a common misassumption.
“Let’s be clear that defence tech is not only about weapons. It’s about smart solutions for logistics, media propaganda, software solutions, and drones. Weapons are just a small part of it,” Yaniieva said.
But funding is even difficult for Ukranian start-ups that are trying to save lives.
ADVERTISEMENTAnima is a Kyiv-based start-up that tries to understand mental health by tracking eye movement via a computer camera. It does this by looking at attention behaviour, which can determine what is happening with the psyche in terms of mental health.
The company claims it can predict whether a person is going to develop any kind of disorder, a person’s current mental state and whether they need help.
Anima was started in response to the COVID-19 pandemic but is being used by Ukraine’s military and hospitals in unofficial clinical tests.
Roman Havrysh, CEO and Co-Founder of Anima, told Euronews Next that about 22,000 people in Ukraine are using the service to improve their mental health.
“The war is probably the worst condition a human can find themselves [in] and so that was the idea to give people the tool, to understand themselves better and to better navigate through challenging times,” he said.
ADVERTISEMENTBut then when it was used by military psychologists and hospitals, it was seen as useful as the psychologist questionnaires usually given to soldiers can easily be manipulated by the soldiers to get the results they want.
“They started using our company to assess military personnel’s conditions between missions and whether people are capable of doing the mission or not. Because the psychological condition is probably the biggest influencer on the battlefield,” Havrysh said.
The company is also planning to use the technology to better understand the impacts of concussions on the brain, which is a common problem for soldiers.
Despite the promising tech, Havrysh said it is bad timing for funding due to the “war and investment climate in Ukraine”.
“Even before the war, Ukraine was not the best country to invest in,” he said, adding he is having to reinvest from his other companies into Anima.
ADVERTISEMENTThe foreign funding problem
On top of Ukrainian investors being wary of investing in Anima as they are careful with the new technology, foreign investment is also difficult.
“Unfortunately, our investors are not protected by law because they are in the United States or somewhere else. So we are struggling heavily with this,” he said.
“Despite President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy saying that we are very welcoming of investment, unfortunately, that’s not the case right now. They are kind of trying to get there, but it’s still a long journey ahead”.
Havrysh said this creates a brain drain, with many Ukrainian companies relocating to countries such as Canada.
“Investor relations on the global governmental level should be updated to help us. We will probably at some point need to also relocate, otherwise we will probably fail”.
ADVERTISEMENTArmy SOS, which does not use weapons but defence strategies such as defence mapping software for logistics and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, has also seen funding dry up.
“People were more invested in the start of the war because they were expecting it to be a quick victory in a couple of months,” said Mykhailo Yatsyshyn, head of the UK office of Army SOS.
“We are defending not just our country, we are defending the war and if you invest, you are investing in saving people’s lives and that’s the most important,” he told Euronews Next.
“We have only one target and that is Russia. So we need to just destroy this regime and bring Ukraine to victory and back to normal life. That’s my hope for 2024,” he added.
