The “crazy professors” making drones for Ukraine

The day before Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” was a good one for Alexei and Kostya, tech entrepreneurs in their 30s from the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine. An investor had agreed to fund their startup: the friends were developing a device to make electric-car charging-points more efficient. Alexei was an electronics engineer at Kherson State University. Kostya was the manager of the local Apple Store. (They didn’t want to give their surnames.)

Within days, Kherson fell to the Russians and the men’s plans were in tatters. The Apple Store was looted and closed; university classes were suspended. The men joined the resistance – Alexei made explosives in his apartment while Kostya drove his red Tesla round the city pretending to be a taxi but actually delivering ammonia to bombmakers. When Kherson was liberated in November, they started a new business: making drones for the Ukrainian army.

In June I met Alexei and Kostya in Kherson at the house of a friend of theirs – they wanted to keep the location of their workshop secret. Before they told me about their project, the men recounted their misadventures under occupation. It wasn’t long, they said, before the FSB, Russian intelligence, cottoned on to their resistance activities. Alexei, who has tufty strawberry-blond hair, sits bolt upright and talks in efficient, short sentences, showed me the Russian TV news report of his arrest in summer 2022. He smiled shyly at the newscaster’s description of  “a terrorist planning mass murder”.

He said the FSB offered him a huge sum of money – hundreds of thousands of euros – to work for them. This kind of coercion was common, they said. To refuse the carrot of money was to risk the stick of “the basement”, being detained and probably tortured. Alexei demurred, was released and kept his head down.

Kostya, who has dark hair and a similarly laconic manner, was stopped by the Russians while he was driving with his wife and small daughter. They confiscated his identity documents and tried to get into his phone; he thinks they only let him go home because his daughter was crying and the officer took pity on them.

The FSB recruited him shortly afterwards – although Kostya stressed he kept in touch with Ukrainian intelligence throughout. The Russians set him a task of repairing computers, before checking them to see if he had installed bugging devices. He worked as a double agent for a few weeks, until the Ukrainian counter-offensive pushed closer and his taskmasters disappeared.

In Kherson, the duo’s reputation as electronics whizzes and bombmakers spread. One resistance member I talked to called them “the crazy professors”. When the Ukrainians liberated the city in November, Ukrainian intelligence debriefed them. The Russians had withdrawn across the Dnieper river, but were now shelling Kherson daily; the army needed their know-how.

Alexei showed an intelligence officer a remote-controlled detonator he had designed that couldn’t be jammed. Before long the pair were visited by artillery and air-force commanders, mine-clearance teams and reconnaissance units who were flying drones over the river to observe Russian positions. “And so began our military production,” said Kostya.

In wartime Ukraine it sometimes seems as though half the population is building drones in their spare time. Recently a friend of mine opened the trunk of his car to show off two ovoid plastic objects. They were water drones, designed to blow up the mines the Russians tether to the bottom of the Dnieper to impede Ukrainian reconnaissance teams in rubber boats.

Volunteers have been supplying the Ukrainian armed forces since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatists in Donbas. Grassroots organisations sprang up to support the Ukrainian volunteers fighting the Russian-backed rebels. “It’s kind of a joke, that this war has always been fought by volunteers, and with donated money,” said Alexei. “Well it’s not exactly a joke, it’s kind of true.”

Most Ukrainians, inside and outside the country, give money to the war effort. Soldiers’ friends and relatives drum up donations via social media, while soldiers themselves raise money selling military patches and merchandise. Volunteers run food kitchens, distribute aid to villages on the front line, rehouse displaced people, ferry the wounded and the dead. Private companies donate time and goods, share premises and logistics.

One of the biggest volunteer organisations is Come Back Alive, which in 2014 began raising money and sending equipment to troops in Donbas. In 2021 it brought in $550,000; last year it raised $155m. It now works with 700 military units: supplying equipment, refurbishing command posts, training medics and bomb-disposal teams and running courses on how to adapt Soviet-era weapons. Most notably, it co-ordinates the design and supply of drones,  equipped with cameras or explosives. Taras Chmut, one of the founders of Come Back Alive, reckons that 90% of Ukrainian drones are supplied by volunteers.

Alexei and Kostya called their new company Midnight Lab, because, as a friend of theirs pointed out, they were always working through the night. Based in a workshop in Kherson, the duo and a third colleague design and build military gadgets to the background thump of the artillery duel across the river. When I made a comment about it having been a bit noisy the night before, Alexei shrugged: “not so loud”. “It’s loud if it lands in your apartment,” said Kostya wryly. Three months ago a rocket landed in the courtyard of his apartment block.

One of Midnight Lab’s most popular products, especially with mine-clearance teams and special forces, is a remote-controlled detonator. Unit commanders come to them with special requests. A sapper showed them a Scorpion, an American-made precision-guided missile, and ordered something similar but smaller. Sometimes inspiration comes from closer to home: Alexei recently designed a grenade made from a beer can.

Midnight Lab offers a range of drones, including a reconnaissance drone with an autopilot system that can continue to operate even if it loses signal, and a “kamikaze” one, packed with explosives, with a range of 20km – popular with soldiers fighting on the contested islands in the Dnieper delta. They also make anti-drone rifles, used to jam enemy drone signals.

The drone war has evolved into a technological race: to jam, and to be unjammable. According to the Ukrainian government, there are more than 200 companies officially manufacturing drones in Ukraine and hundreds more smaller-scale operations, like Midnight Lab. Alexei and Kostya build most of their products with a 3D-printer and source electronic components from abroad and within Ukraine.

They are experimenting with AI, silent motors and wooden frames: this innovation is driven by changing needs on the battlefield. Their work isn’t secret – Midnight Lab advertises its products on a website – but the company is unlicensed and operates entirely outside the parameters of the Ukrainian armed forces. “If the Ministry of Defence knew what we were doing they would shut us down,” said Kostya, laughing.

It sometimes feels as if there are two Ukraines. The old one with a Soviet hangover: bureaucratic, corrupt, inefficient. And the new one, fuelled by a younger generation forged in the Maidan revolution of 2014 that overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president. These citizen-activists have established a parallel polity in a volunteer sector that is nimble, creative and digitally literate.

“The government is slow and ineffective,” Taras Chmut from Come Back Alive told me. “If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t exist.” Soldiers I spoke to in Kherson rolled their eyes at “the paper army”, the bureaucratic procurement procedures of the Ministry of Defence. Chmut is more sympathetic. “I don’t like it when people say the ministry is bad in some way,” he told me. “It’s not obstructive…it’s just that they pay silly small salaries, so the smarter people don’t tend to work there. It’s no better or worse than any other ministry. It’s just the way Ukraine is.”

Oleksander Kamyshin was appointed minister of strategic industries, responsible for military production in Ukraine, in March. Before that he was CEO of the Ukrainian state railway company, credited with keeping the trains running and remarkably on time, despite often coming under attack.

I met him in his office in Kyiv at the end of a working day. In person he is tall, imposing, magnetic; his hair is razored on the sides and the top plaited in the style of a Cossack warrior. He told me he wants to pull his corner of government into what he calls Ukraine 2.0. “We are trying to build a new country,” he said, “taking the parts we love, getting rid of the parts we don’t. It’s motivation: to give us something to fight for.”

Kamyshin has his work cut out for him: “My house is on fire, there are flames in every corner.” As soon as he started his new job, he ramped up defence production, starting with ammunition: bullets, mortars and artillery shells. He showed me a graph which indicated that the output in June was almost two and a half times that of the whole of 2022. Then he turned his attention to anti-tank guided missiles and smaller armoured vehicles.

Now Kamyshin is trying to find the right approach for drone production in conjunction with the Ministry of Digital Transformation. He acknowledged that the volunteer sector has been important, but said that he was worried that if they continued to supply military drones, the Ministry of Defence would never have the incentive to organise the development, production and training necessary for a co-ordinated strategy.

He is particularly concerned about the haphazard way drones are pouring into the front line: some manufactured abroad, some in Ukrainian factories, some adapted from civilian to military use by hobbyist-engineers. This, said Kamyshin, made it impossible to keep tabs on how they are being used and the relative effectiveness of different models. “I’m a data guy,” he said, referring to his background in business and finance. “I believe if you can’t measure something you can’t manage it.”

While startups like Midnight Lab have MacGyvered innovation for the battlefield, there are limits to what a small workshop can produce. Kamyshin said that Ukrainian companies were not yet manufacturing larger and longer-range kamikaze drones, like the ones Russian forces have deployed against Ukrainian cities, because they were expensive and complicated to produce.

Kamyshin wants the Ministry of Defence to step up its certification process for Ukrainian defence contractors, so that more manufacturers can be brought into the scope of state procurement. This is happening. The government has signed contracts with more than 40 defence companies, and recently announced a budget of almost a billion euros for drone production and procurement.

Chmut told me that Come Back Alive already co-ordinates with other volunteer funds and with the Ministry of Defence, in order to direct supplies to units that need them the most. But, he says, “the volunteer movement is chaotic and spontaneous and it should be like that, otherwise it doesn’t work. Any effort to organise it, or put it in a frame would hurt it.”

Kamyshin understands the argument. The Russian army’s supply chain is, he said, “vertical but rotten. When an issue arises, Russia is slow to deliver a solution.” But he acknowledged that although Russia’s centralised purchasing system meant that equipment takes a while to reach the front line, “it is in greater quantity and at a lower price. In Ukraine we are faster, but not co-ordinated.”

Kamyshin has been trying to work with the leading volunteer funds to harness their expertise, and negotiate a middle way. “Thank god we have these funds,” he said, “they are part of our national superpower.” He recognises their ability to adapt, to fill gaps where needed.

Meanwhile, Alexei and Kostya are busy in their workshop, trying to replicate anti-jamming technology from a foreign drone. “Russia has already lost,” said Alexei, “but we haven’t yet won.” After the war, they want to resurrect their electric-car-charging startup. First save Ukraine, then the planet. ■

Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. You can read her previous dispatches from the war in Ukraine for 1843 magazine, and the rest of our coverage, here