Name: Sky News secures exclusive access inside a Ukrainian drone factory
Uploaded: 2025-08-27T15:11:09.000Z
Duration: 4 min 33 s
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In a nondescript office building in a secret location, stacks and stacks of one of the most lethally effective weapons in this war.

They're put together like toys, with care and precision, fitted with parts, programmed and customised to hunt, intercept and kill.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

They're made as quickly as possible to meet demand from the front, starting as volunteers making 100 a month, they're now producing 1,000 times that.

It's still not enough, because Russians have a lot of troops, a lot of vehicles, and our soldiers every day, every day, tell us that we need more, we need more weapons, we need better, we need faster, we need it higher, and more and more.

Each drone is tested before being sent to the front line.

Dima played with drones at home before the Russians occupied it, now he's here ensuring they're up to the job of killing the enemy effectively.

This is how Ukraine has held off the Russians for more than three years, improvising with extraordinary start-up ingenuity.

They move often and keep its location secret.

We've been given exclusive access because they need help.

I need to say that it's not about only money investments, we need investments of people, of scientists, of engineers that can help us.

They can give more help, they can give more investments, they can give more solutions, more technical solutions.

At the start of the war, drones gave Ukrainians the power to hold off the invaders, cheap and devastating, against Russia's war machine.

This is the $1,000 drone taking out a $300,000 Russian one.

In the air and on the ground, they have hunted the enemy without mercy.

But they're losing the upper hand now, with implications not just for Ukraine.

This conflict has revolutionised warfare.

It's becoming a sci-fi battle between machines.

And whoever wins the drone's arms race gets the upper hand not just in this conflict, but other wars to come.

The Russians are now openly showing off their drone factories, sinister pictures showing high-tech production lines churning out thousands of attack drones to take off for the back of pick-up trucks.

Russia is operating on a scale Ukraine can only dream of.

Hundreds of these killing machines are launched against Ukraine every night, taking scores of civilian lives.

It is a constant battle to stay one step ahead.

Oleksandr showed us a new prototype, guided by a trail of fibre-optic thread, to prevent Russian jamming.

But, he says, the Russians, with Chinese help, have them too.

The Russians began using the technology earlier and have scaled up production.

They've had considerable help from the Chinese.

Entire factories are under contract to supply fibre exclusively to Russia, producing it in vast quantities.

In just three and a half years, drones have transformed the way war is waged.

Raising the question, could humans soon become obsolete on the battlefield?

Do you think drones will get rid of soldiers completely?

I think it's the future and nowadays we have statistics that 80% of all strikes on the battlefield are done by drones.

We already understood from the very beginning that the future is, in the future war, it's about technologies.

So every book that you read about the future, it can be right now.

While diplomats wrangle over security guarantees for after the war, Ukraine says it has more pressing needs right now.

Against Russia's militarised economy, they are losing the edge and can only prevail, they say, with more help from the West.

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Sky News secures exclusive access inside a Ukrainian drone factory

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