The founder of the largest private military company in the world, Blackwater, Eric Prince, has entered the Ukrainian defense market and is looking for opportunities to acquire companies that produce drones.
The founder of the largest private military company in the world, Blackwater, Eric Prince, has entered the Ukrainian defense market and is looking for opportunities to acquire companies that produce drones.
According to The Guardian, Prince is in Kyiv, where he is holding meetings with representatives of the UAV industry and offering his services. According to the interlocutors of the publication, he is targeting drone companies, which have become strategic assets for Ukraine during the war.
The interest in Ukrainian developments is understandable: drones have already become a key tool on the battlefield, and experts estimate that they have caused most of the losses of Russian troops. As a result, the Ukrainian sector is attracting the attention of investors and defense corporations from around the world.
Prince has a history of such initiatives. This year, he advised on a drone program in Haiti and reportedly sent hundreds of fighters there through his company, Vectus Global. In 2018, he tried to propose a private army for Afghanistan, funded by mineral extraction. He is also known to have set up a security structure in China, staffed by former PLA soldiers, which has drawn further criticism.
Blackwater, founded by Prince, was active in Iraq and Afghanistan, performing tasks for the CIA, the State Department, and the Pentagon. The company received multimillion-dollar contracts, but after a tragic incident in Baghdad in 2007, where civilians were killed, its reputation took a serious hit, and the brand itself disappeared from the market.
This is not the first time Prince has tried to enter Ukraine: back in 2020, he proposed to then-president-elect Volodymyr Zelensky a multi-billion dollar project involving private forces to resolve the war in Donbas. However, this idea remained unimplemented at that time.
Recall, dev.ua recently wrote about how the Ukrainian defense company Fire Point, known for the FP-5 «Flamingo» cruise missile and the FP-1 kamikaze drone, introduced new ballistic missiles FP-7 and FP-9 and the FP-2 strike drone.
