The United States and Ukraine have drafted a memorandum that would lay the groundwork for a new defense deal, including the possibility of joint drone manufacturing Ukraine US companies could take part in, according to people familiar with the effort. The draft was hashed out by the U.S. State Department and Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Olha Stefanishyna.
The memorandum is a first step toward an agreement that would allow Ukraine to export military technology to the United States and build drones with American firms. It comes after Ukrainian officials first pitched drone cooperation to the White House in August 2025, a push that gained added weight after President Trump privately praised Operation Spiderweb, the Ukrainian drone strike deep behind Russian lines that destroyed dozens of Russian warplanes parked on tarmacs around the country.
For Kyiv, the timing matters because Ukraine is already trying to turn wartime weapons production into a longer-term export business. Ukraine’s National Security Council projects defense production capacity of $55 billion in 2026, while the government currently has funds to buy around $15 billion worth of weapons this year. One Ukrainian manufacturer says it plans to produce more than 3 million low-cost first-person-view military drones in 2026, a scale that would dwarf the 300,000 drones built in the United States in 2025.
Ukraine has been signing defense agreements at a fast clip. Over the last two months, it has reached deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said nearly 20 countries are involved at various stages, that 4 agreements have already been signed, and that the first contracts under those agreements are now being prepared.
The broader push reflects how far Ukraine’s drone industry has come during more than four years of war with Russia. Ukrainian forces have developed drone and electronic warfare capabilities under fire, and have also sent drone interceptors and pilots to the Middle East to help U.S. allies defend against Iranian-designed Shahed drones. Technology pioneered by Sine Engineering, which lets drones fly without GPS guidance to evade signal-jamming, has already drawn a multi-million dollar investment from the U.S.-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.
There is also an American testing ground for that know-how. In March, General Cherry signed a deal to make unmanned aerial vehicles in the United States alongside Wilcox Industries, and the Pentagon has invited Ukrainian companies to join its Drone Dominance initiative, a $1.1 billion program aimed at identifying drones for U.S. military contracts. The new memorandum would not settle the larger political complexities around the defense deal, but it would move both governments closer to turning Ukrainian battlefield innovation into a shared industrial project.
What remains unsettled is how quickly that cooperation can move from draft language to signed contracts, and whether the political will in Washington will match the speed of Ukraine’s drone industry.
