Before Russia invaded in 2022, Pyotr Ivanenko produced sports equipment in Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv. When Russian troops surrounded the city, bombarding it relentlessly and prompting three-quarters of the population to flee, Ivanenko, a fit man with a shaved head and ice green eyes, made a decision. “I needed to change what I was doing,” he told me an interview, “to switch to making what the country needs.” (Ivanenko is not his real name—he requested a pseudonym to protect his business and his family.)
By 2023, he was churning out homegrown armored vehicles—his company makes everything but the engines—and angling for a contract with the defense ministry. By 2025, he had developed two types of unmanned ground vehicles that can transport supplies to remote military positions, evacuate wounded soldiers, and carry a mounted gun into hostile territory, allowing a gunner in the rear to fire at the enemy from close range.
Now, like almost all Ukrainian arms manufacturers, Ivanenko has a problem. His defense ministry contract is coming to an end, and although he sells personnel carriers and robotized vehicles to fighting units all along the front line, he says he could make 10 times as many if the government had the money to buy them. But the 2025 Ukrainian budget allocates just $17.5 billion to purchase weapons, exactly half the $35 billon in equipment the domestic arms industry says it can produce. Virtually all manufacturers, large and small, are clamoring for some kind of relief.
