War

Ukrainian defense tech has already become a separate industry with its own rules, competition, and personnel challenges. Companies are no longer arguing about whether drones are needed — now they are looking for answers to other questions: how to protect themselves from FPV drones, which engineers are most in short supply, why robotics is becoming the next stage of war, and how to convince IT professionals to move into the defense industry. In the new dev.ua series, we ask the same questions to the heads of Ukrainian defense tech companies to show what Ukrainian miltech is doing today, what challenges it is experiencing, and where the industry is heading. The hero of this issue is CEO and co-founder of Frontline Robotics Yevhen Tretyak, who told why the main limitation of the development of the defense industry is not money, but people, what technologies are overvalued today, why the fight against FPV drones will become one of the key areas of the coming years, and why, in his opinion, modern defense tech is very reminiscent of Ukrainian IT from fifteen years ago.

While the leadership of the Ministry of Defense in Ukraine has just changed, and the industry is still discussing whether it will be possible to maintain the pace of reforms without Mykhailo Fedorov, another discussion is taking place in Europe in parallel: whether the Western defense industry is ready to even come close to the speed at which Ukrainian deftech works. The topic of integrating Ukrainian defense experience into European defense policy has been heard more and more often in recent months — from Eurosatory to the Ukraine Recovery Conference. dev.ua talked to representatives of Ukrainian deftech companies — DevDroid, SKIFTECH, BlueBird Tech, Frontline Robotics, Himera, and Dwarf Engineering — about why European manufacturers are not keeping up with the Ukrainian pace of innovation, what they have already learned and what they still do not understand, and what partnerships between Ukrainian and European companies really look like.

Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who may leave the government, held a candid press conference for journalists and MPs. He summed up the results of his work since 2019, spoke about the architecture of technological warfare, and openly named the reasons for the conflict with Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky.

Almost a year ago,Ukrainians protested against Law No. 12414 , which undermined the independence of the anti-corruption bodies NABU and SAPO. Social networks have already called July a “month of stupid decisions,” and people with cardboard boxes are making history again. In the morning, peaceful “cardboard protests” started in different cities of the country in support of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. dev.ua has collected for you the most striking slogans from different parts of Ukraine.

In early June, military medic Victoria «Tori» Honcharuk took over as head of AB3.Tech, a defense technology partnership platform created by the Third Army Corps. Within weeks, she was heading to her first major international event in her new role, one of the largest defense events, Eurosatory 2026, in Paris. Immediately after returning from the forum, where AB3.Tech reached important agreements with foreign defense companies, Viktoriya found time to talk to a dev.ua journalist. We asked her in detail about her tasks at AB3.Tech, the role of the platform in establishing connections between deftech manufacturers and the military, as well as her combat path and previous background.