Ukraine's FPV drone contracting surges 54% as overall drone orders jump 300%

TLDR

• Ukraine's Defense Procurement Agency has contracted roughly 5.5 times as many drones of all types in recent months as in the same period of 2025, a roughly 300% increase for the full year, the Defense Ministry said October 11.¹²
• Contracting for FPV attack drones in 2026 already exceeds the full-year total for 2025 by 54%, and FPV deliveries have risen almost fourfold.¹²
• The agency contracted about $8 billion worth of drones in the first half of 2026 alone, double the same period last year.¹
• Most purchasing now runs through the DOT-Chain Defense marketplace, where military units select what they need and the agency handles contracts and logistics, cutting average delivery time for in-stock items to 9 days.¹

Ukraine's Defense Procurement Agency has contracted about 5.5 times as many drones of various types in recent months as it did over the same period in 2025, pushing the full-year increase to roughly 300%, the Defense Ministry said October 11.¹² The agency contracted about $8 billion worth of drones in the first half of 2026 alone, double the amount for the same period last year.¹

Contracting for FPV drones, the cheap first-person-view quadcopters that do much of the front-line strike work, has grown fastest: 2026 orders already exceed the full-2025 total by 54%, and deliveries have risen almost 3.7 times.¹² Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara said the ministry wants to arm the force "at every level," from deep-strike drones hitting targets inside Russia to drones aimed at enemy drone crews, logistics and command posts.¹² "Technology and having enough of these systems raise combat effectiveness and at the same time reduce the risks for our soldiers," Khmara said.¹

Most of the buying now runs through the DOT-Chain Defense marketplace, where military units select what they need directly and the agency handles the contracts and logistics, cutting the average delivery time for in-stock items to 9 days.¹ Khmara credited the jump to international partner support and the scaling of Ukraine's own defense industry, and said the ministry is trying to align front-line needs, purchase planning and domestic production capacity to make supply more predictable, which in turn lets manufacturers build out production lines and order components in advance.¹

Why it matters: a 54% jump in FPV orders and a near-quadrupling of deliveries is one of the clearest numeric signals yet of how far Ukraine's drone-dependent war economy has scaled in a single year, and the shift toward a self-service marketplace model for units ordering drones is a notable change in how a modern military actually buys the weapons that do most of its front-line killing.