Deep Dive: Ukraine-UK defense tech cooperation pathways

BLUF: British companies are trying to access Ukrainian innovations, and to use Ukraine’s excess production capacity at a time when Europe is overstretched. Yet export controls for Ukrainian equipment and concerns about the country’s business environment mean this is still underexploited. 

Forums including Brave1 and the UK-Ukraine TechBridge have been created to guide cooperation, while programs such as the Drone Coalition allow companies to compete in each other’s procurement processes. 

PLUS: A case study: Rowden’s ‘Mimic.’

Since 2022, the UK has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters, providing £12.8B of direct aid state-to-state, of which £7.8B has been in the form of military assistance. 

But we’re also seeing deepening commercial relationships in the defense sector.

Several large British ‘primes’ are already operating in the country: after a 2024 UK trade mission to Kyiv in April 2024, BAE Systems was awarded a contract to maintain and repair L119 Light Guns in-country. 

In February a deal was also signed to extend Babcock’s contract to maintain assets sent to Ukraine, such as the Challenger 2 tank; they also were tapped to train Ukrainian engineers and to help manage supply chains.

At the same time, a new UK-UKR defense agreement has been signed, which includes provisions to create joint private defence enterprises which compete together for exports to foreign markets, as well as deeper cooperation on long-range missile and integrated air and missile capabilities.

An accompanying Framework Agreement was also signed to allow Ukraine access to underwritten loans, in which they can submit contracts to UK-based defense companies. It also allows the UK MOD the ability to open contracts with British companies on Ukraine’s behalf. 

"The UK has massive amounts to learn in our industrial strategy,” Rob Harper, the founder of British company Rowden Technologies, told Counteroffensive.Pro. He said that this includes learning how Ukraine has grown a network of innovative defence startups.

An under-invested market

The Ukrainian defense industry is not dominated by a few large ‘prime’ contractors. Instead, it is driven by many small and medium enterprise (SME) defense startups. Since the beginning of the war, they have been growing fast largely thanks to the removal of highly bureaucratic procurement procedures and a concerted effort to empower the industry. 

This included simplifying the process of approving equipment for use on the frontline and speeding up the process of evaluating prototypes.

The country also has excess manufacturing capability — the Ukrainian MoD estimates Ukraine has the capacity for $35 billion worth of defense production, but it can only afford to allocate $12 billion to weapons purchases in the 2025 budget. 

This market also remains under-invested by international investors. There is an untapped potential for partnership with these companies, especially by Western defense startups who are better equipped to handle a higher level of risk and possess a similar fast-acting culture.

“I know lots of Ukrainian companies that have done very well supporting their country but want to grow their businesses into Europe in the future and our view is the only way that's viable is in partnership,” British defense entrepreneur Jon Williams told Counteroffensive.Pro. 

Williams is attempting to connect governments and defense startups around Europe, including Ukraine, and building a platform to connect procurement departments with smaller companies. This platform is called Allied Adaptive Industries.

Several other bodies, both private and public, have been launched to support collaboration between the United Kingdom and Ukraine in the areas of tech and defense :

1. UK-Ukraine TechBridge – launched in January 2024 in partnership between the UK government, the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Aims to connect UK and Ukrainian tech businesses, as well as business-to-government engagement. Led by ministers Gareth Thomas and Oleksandr Bornyakov.

2. Drone Coalition: a program co-led by the UK and Latvia to develop a European drone industry to supply Ukraine. Launched in July 2024, the UK MOD has put out tenders to supply FPV and interceptor drones, with testing facilities for the drones in Latvia. Ukrainian drone companies also may take part in tenders and supply their drones to AFU via the Drone Coalition. On 9th January it was announced that 30,000 drones will be sent to Ukraine with contracts worth £45m.

3. Led by founder Stephen Butler, Strategy Council has convened several events gathering key stakeholders, hosted by the RUSI think tank in London. A 2nd UK-UA defence forum is scheduled for April 25th 2025 in London.

There are significant benefits of partnership with Ukrainian defense to UK companies:

• Access to innovations and expertise in Ukraine

• Battlefield testing of equipment against a near-peer competitor

• Real-time feedback about rapidly changing battle tactics and requirements

• Lower salary and production costs in Ukraine

As well as for Ukrainian companies:

• Access to contracts from British companies

• Greater international exposure, including boosting credibility with investors

• Ability to access international procurement markets

• Experience operating in a more regulated environment

Difficulties getting a defense contract in the UK

Purely Ukraine-located enterprises struggle to find international investment as they “tick all the boxes with potential risk," said Andriy Dovbenko, an early-stage investor who founded UK-Ukraine TechExchange, a non-profit platform connecting Ukrainian startups with investors. 

Instead, a presence outside Ukraine is “a necessary option for you to be even potentially investable.” As a result, many companies have registered offices in other domains already. Dovbenko tries to help Ukrainian miltech find partners in the UK.

He explained that Ukraine struggles with corruption and is still implementing comprehensive IP laws. So the main potential buyers are the Ukrainian government, charitable funds, and even military units themselves.

As an alternative, TechExchange has helped the Ukrainian tethered-drone company Huless to raise $1 million internationally for future research and development of their Highline-T product, a system designed to allow a tethered drone to operate for long periods in a GPS-denied environment.

The company has also worked with Drone Space Labs, a Ukrainian R&D company that develops UAVs that operate at long ranges. Developers have submitted a bid to the UK government’s Drone Coalition program and have recently taken part in trials of their drone at testing facilities in Latvia.

Programs like the Drone Coalition allow Ukrainian companies to sell directly to the UK MoD, which then transfers the equipment to Ukraine. But there is little opportunity for Ukrainian companies to sell directly to Western governments for Western use, Dovbenko said. 

“In most of the cases the UK government is ready to buy only from UK companies, which makes perfect sense,” Dovbenko said. Ukrainian companies could establish manufacturing facilities in the UK but it would affect costs, he added. 

Instead, Ukrainian companies can gain access to this market outside of programs like the Drone Coalition by collaborating with experienced UK companies in forming a joint venture and creating a product together. 

For the United Kingdom, Ukrainian-developed products could be much cheaper than purely UK-designed technology. It also has another key advantage — the product will likely be battle-proven. 

"The type of feedback is very quick for good Ukrainian products from the front line,” explained Dovbenko.

In particular — about changing tactics on the frontline or information about the latest innovations, Rob Harper said. Direct partnerships with Ukrainian companies who have frontline experience can help bridge this gap, he added.

CASE STUDY: Rowden Technologies’ Mimic in Ukraine

Rowden Technologies specializes in producing information and sensing systems for operation in remote or demanding environments. This includes closed networks for secure communication and systems designed for GPS and GNSS-denied environments. 

Their new product Mimic was developed in partnership with the Ukrainian AI software company Impressit and is produced in Ukraine. 

Mimic is a radio-frequency decoy system designed to protect high-value targets by luring the enemy away via fake signals. 

While analyzing the Ukrainian market, Harper was “taken aback" by the quality of some of the Ukrainian engineering work. According to him, Ukrainian defense startups can move and adapt "mind-blowingly quickly.” 

Still, the acclimatization for businesses from the two countries cooperating has taken some time:

“You're taking companies with a significantly lower threshold for risk and asking them to go and meet people in a war zone. And that's not normal for a lot of UK businesses,” he explained.

Planning to manufacture Mimic in Ukraine, Harper was initially motivated by “being in the economic fight.” For him, situating production in Ukraine was a way to boost the economy and industry of the country going through war.

Harper also noticed the “huge potential for significantly more cost-effective solutions.” For example, Ukrainian companies build drones and electronic warfare equipment at a lower price than this kind of equipment cost at the start of the war. 

The company has also found that “building stuff in collaboration" created highly advanced equipment that is desirable across NATO due to its battle-tested nature against a near-peer competitor.

Rowden Technologies may put down deeper roots in Ukraine. Now it is exploring a potential partnership with Farsight Vision, a Ukrainian company that converts information from drone feeds into 3D models of the local environment.

Barriers to Technology Sharing

For many the key thing is the access to Ukrainian technological innovations, born and tested on the battlefield. This is especially true in the drone and electronic warfare spheres.

“I don't think there are any examples of Ukrainian defense technology being shared with Western companies for development by those companies outside of Ukraine,” defense technology entrepreneur Jon Williams told Counteroffensive.Pro.  

Ukraine has instituted strict export and IP rules for its defense companies since the beginning of the war, as Counteroffensive.Pro has reported. 

Some Ukrainian companies have avoided these controls by opening up corporate structures in other countries, Williams said. 

“The export restrictions, while not entirely prohibitive, are effectively entirely prohibitive. And when we had begun conversations with companies about even exporting their technology to build some of that technology in a third country to give back to Ukraine, that's not a straightforward process,” Williams said.

Ukrainian companies will still hold value even in an environment with less strict export controls, Williams believes. 

"What's powerful is the speed at which people are assembling, testing, iterating those technologies and that's a combination of sort of proximity to the front line and the need, the urgency of solutions,” he explained.

For a similar reason, Rob Harper believes that the Ukrainian defense industry will remain influential. According to him, it would “stop being just a hub for outsourcing, and become a hub for new innovative technologies, and I genuinely believe can lead in a lot of areas of defense tech.”