Here Are the Ukrainian Weapon Systems NATO Wants to Get Its Hands On
Ukraine’s Defense Startups Are NATO’s New Arms Dealers
As a writer, one of the most amazing things to watch over the past ten years of war in Ukraine has been the gob-smacking innovation (I’m trying to get my profanity under control), and all-around MacGyver attitude to making things work in Ukraine.
When you watch Ukrainian engineers Gorilla Glue a Sidewinder missile to a naval drone and actually shoot down a modern Russian fighter jet, you start to understand why Western investors are lining up to throw money at Ukrainian startups.
These Ukrainian companies are innovating while under artillery fire. That is the difference between theory in a lab and proof on the battlefield.
And right now, NATO wants a piece of that action.
Not long ago, Ukraine’s “R&D department” looked like a Telegram channel where soldiers sought quadcopters and supporters wired them cash. Jump to mid-2025, and some defense-tech startups are raising $20 million in a single month.
For Silicon Valley, that’s a long lunch with VCs.
For a country fighting for its existence, it is an entirely new industry born under fire.
In 2024, Ukrainian defense startups raised $59 million, mostly grants.
Now in 2025, the money is bigger, faster, and smarter. This time, it’s Western defense giants buying into the future. Because they know Ukraine has something the rest of NATO doesn’t: combat-proven hardware designed to fight Russia’s exact playbook.
So, what is the most in-demand Ukrainian tech?
First up, drones: the bread and butter of Ukraine’s battlefield dominance.
NATO planners look at Ukraine’s $500 FPV kamikazes and see the kind of cost-to-kill ratio their own procurement programs can only dream about.
Why spend $150,000 on a Javelin when a quadcopter with an Nvidia brain and an RPG warhead can achieve the same effect for the price of a weekend at Disney World? NATO wants in because these drones are actually changing the battlefield doctrine on combined arms, and they are cheap enough to scale faster than Russia can build new armor.
Next on the shopping list are ground robots. Ukraine’s TerMIT and other unmanned ground vehicles have hauled ammo, evacuated wounded, and even carried machine guns into combat.
To NATO, these robots represent a way to keep soldiers out of minefields and drone-scoped kill zones. In wars of attrition, a machine hauling water and rockets through artillery fire means one less human body in the medevac queue.
NATO armies have dabbled in robotics for years, with its INSANELY long procurement cycle of prototype, test, refine, test, refine, and keep testing in perpetuity. Next-gen weapons like rail guns, battlefield lasers, mobility armor suits, and robots are always “just around the corner,” but they never arrive!
Remember the robot dog from Boston Dynamics? It was unveiled in February 2015. Where is it? Oh, that’s right… Still in development, with only two or three units across the entire US military fielding robotics.
TEN YEARS PEOPLE. Sorry, I don’t mean to yell at you. I’m just exasperated.
Ukraine is showing what it looks like when you let robots take live fire and then feed that combat data straight back into the design lab… And then build a better robot tomorrow.
Then there are the electronic ghosts, the invisible war over the spectrum.
NATO knows Russia’s strongest card is its electronic warfare. Jamming, spoofing, frying signals… it is the one area where Russia still punches above its weight. Ukraine’s startups are developing hardened comms and EW-resistant networks that can survive in that environment.
These include modular radios that don’t need GPS, spectrum-hopping drones that ignore jamming, and field-hardened mesh networks that let soldiers keep talking when the ether turns toxic.
For NATO, this is gold. Because in a real peer-to-peer fight, your tank’s armor matters less than your ability to keep the platoon net alive under electronic fire.
Finally, NATO has its eyes on Ukraine’s battlefield AI. To be clear, I’m not talking about the marketing hype surrounding AI large language models.
This is code written in bunkers that tells a drone swarm which tank to hit first or predicts Russian artillery fire before it lands. These AI-driven targeting systems are shaving precious seconds off the kill chain and turning Ukrainian units into hunter-killer teams that fight faster than Russia can react.
NATO’s doctrine is already obsessed with shortening the kill chain. Ukraine just demonstrated that AI can collapse that chain entirely, from spotting to shooting in less time than it takes to light a cigarette.
Okay, so which Ukrainian startups are in line to get that sweet NATO cheddar?
Frontline + Quantum Systems: Germany took a 10% stake in Ukraine’s Frontline drone maker, with an option for more. Call it vertical integration or call it Europe outsourcing its battlefield R&D to Kyiv. Either way, it means drones that are faster, stealthier, and built in bigger numbers.
Tencore: Raised $3.7 million to scale up its TerMIT ground robot, which can do everything from delivering rations to shooting Russians in the face.
Think of it as Boston Dynamics, if Boston Dynamics had a kill count.
Trypillian: Backed by a former UK minister, this startup is building deep-strike and battlefield comms systems. In other words, giving Ukraine a digital hammer to smash Russian logistics without risking lives.
Odd Systems + Terma: Denmark’s biggest defense firm wants in on drone interceptors. Together, they are building airborne pest control for Shaheds and Lancets.
Teletactica: Developing EW systems that keep units talking even when the air is thick with jamming. Because in modern war, silence is death.
UADamage: Raised $400k to speed up demining. Their AI can clear 10,000 square meters in a day. For comparison, a soldier with a probe clears about the size of your kitchen in a day. I know from experience.
Each of these is a lab where combat data turns into battlefield hardware at warp speed.
NATO has entire binders full of ideas for futuristic weapons, many of which die slow deaths in conference rooms after a decade of committee presentations. Ukraine, by contrast, has a brutal lab where ideas either survive Russian fire or they do not.
That means when a Ukrainian startup rolls out a drone, jammer, or battlefield AI tool, it has already been tested under live conditions where mistakes get people killed.
NATO planners love this because it cuts out the middleman of theoretical testing and puts gear directly into the “this works, we know, we tried it last Tuesday in Zaporizhzhia” category.
Western procurement cycles move like glaciers. By the time a NATO committee decides what shade of green a drone should be painted, Ukraine has already gone through three iterations of that same drone and fielded the fourth.
Ukrainian innovation is fast because it has to be. When Russian soldiers are sneaking through underground pipes to infiltrate your rear area, you don’t have 24 months for approval; you have 24 hours to hack together a countermeasure.
NATO sees in Ukraine a crash course in how to accelerate its own painfully slow acquisition processes, which is why they are leaning in hard to Ukrainian partnerships.
Ukraine fights with a constant shortage of everything (except Russian targets).
That scarcity breeds creativity. Soldiers and startups alike have learned how to weld, print, or code their way around every bottleneck.
The West is fascinated because NATO armies have been spoiled with abundance for decades. They buy solutions from defense primes at sticker-shock prices.
Ukraine, on the other hand, produces FrankenSAMs out of spare parts and garage-built drone jammers that outperform million-dollar Western systems.
That kind of garage-band ingenuity is exactly what NATO fears it has lost.
Most NATO members have not faced a peer adversary since the Cold War, and the entire doctrine of the alliance is built around conventional, industrial-scale war. We (the United States) have been fighting insurgents in the desert for the last 25 years. The US military leaders who were serving in 1989 have long since retired; that was the last time anyone at the DoD seriously put any thought into a land war in Europe.
This, my friends, is the important bit: Ukraine is showing that the future belongs to asymmetric tech and tactics layered on top of conventional strength.
FPV drones hunting tanks, AI software predicting artillery fire, naval drones sinking warships… none of this was in NATO’s doctrinal playbook ten years ago. Now, NATO officers are taking notes like undergrads in a lecture hall because they know these asymmetric edges will decide the next war, whether it is in Eastern Europe, the Baltics, or the Taiwan Strait.
Finally, NATO is obsessed because Ukrainian innovation can scale beyond the battlefield.
Many of these technologies have dual-use potential, commercial drones that double as FPVs, secure communications that work just as well for disaster response, and AI software that can analyze both military and civilian logistics.
Western defense companies smell profit, but they also see a shortcut: by partnering with Ukrainians, they leapfrog years of R&D and grab ready-to-export systems.
NATO wants to fold Ukraine into its defense-industrial base not just for altruism, but because this is where the bleeding edge of warfare is being forged.
Russia Watches From the Mud
While Ukraine exports innovation, Russia exports excuses.
Moscow’s defense industry still cannot get enough chips to build decent drones. Its engineers are busy repainting Cold War equipment and calling it “next-gen.” The only decent thing Russia has ramped up is Shahed production (rebranded as the Geran), and those delta-wing monstrosities are extremely easy to mass-produce.
Don’t get me wrong… Russia is still extremely dangerous; let me be careful not to underestimate an adversary who has learned a lot since the bumbling Russian army of 2022. But they are not innovating at the same rate as Ukraine, plain and simple.
Ukraine’s defense-tech startups are prototypes of NATO’s future arsenal.
The alliance will copy, adopt, and scale these ideas. The irony is that Russia, in trying to crush Ukraine, has forced it to become the most innovative military-tech incubator since Israel in the 1970s.
My prediction: the next time NATO fights a peer adversary, it won’t be DARPA that writes the playbook. It will be the Ukrainian startup scene, born in blood, refined under fire, and financed by a coalition that realizes the future of war is already flying over Donetsk.
Would you trust an American defense startup that spent 15 years building pretty PowerPoint decks, or the Ukrainian one that just destroyed a $50 million Russian radar system with a $500 drone?
My point exactly.
Thanks for reading. Слава Україні!
Hey friends, Wes here. I also write on Medium, but that platform has started to reduce my visibility for some unknown reason. That tells me I should focus my energy on the places where I’m growing: Substack and YouTube. If you like your military tech analysis with a side of sarcasm, hit subscribe. It keeps me writing, and keeps Moscow guessing.
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The Ukrainian returns to his coach, who's busy dictating notes onto a tablet and doing calculations. "He's big. What else do you know?"
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Wes,
You’re writing is so fresh and readable because you limit your filtering and zero in on truth and justice. As entertaining and informative as your writing is, your heart is in the right place… why can’t D.C. think like you do? Maybe just the first part if that question. Thank you for this and all of your exceptional writings.