Ukraine's drone production limited to few thousand engineers, expert says

"Engineers and manufacturers are the most important people in the country," Berlinska said. "There are literally only a few thousand people across the country who enable technological breakthroughs. These people need maximum protection, their opinions must be heard, and they must be given every opportunity to work. Because it is these people who hold the front line. It is them and their astute commanders who understand that technology can be used to protect people."

Berlinska noted that Russia has begun to surpass Ukraine in technology, particularly because it receives assistance from engineers from other countries.

"Russia is already actively beginning to surpass us in a number of technological areas," she added. "This is easily explained because they have invested many times more engineers — they simply have more people working on this quantitatively. Secondly, they are assisted by Chinese engineers, Iranian engineers with their Shahed [drones]. They are assisted by Belarusians, North Korea, and others. They have a huge collective engineering brain, made up of a good dozen overt or covert allies of this axis of evil countries. And this greatly outnumbers our collective engineering brain. Although we have, without exaggeration, brilliant engineers, and in fact I know them all."

In July 2024, The Associated Press reported that Ukrainian startups in secret laboratories were successfully creating robots to perform combat missions, clear mines and evacuate the wounded. According to industry specialists, about 250 defense startups were operating in Ukraine at that time.