Drones Must Be Weapons First―Profit Comes Second Kolas Yotaka in Ukraine
文 ｜ Kolas Yotaka
Kolas Yotaka is a Taiwanese author and politician. She previously served as spokesperson for both the Executive Yuan and the Office of the President. A former legislator with the Democratic Progressive Party, she now leads policy initiatives focused on supply chains, defense, and energy security.
In early September, military watchers around the world took note of a historic breakthrough: Ukrainian long-range drones struck deep inside Russian territory, hitting a Gas Condensate Treatment Plant (GCTP) in Russia's Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. Condensate is a byproduct of natural gas extraction. Unlike crude oil, it has to be separated and refined at dedicated facilities, and it is one of Russia's most critical sources of revenue. In other words, the enormous tax income from licensing companies to extract and process this condensate has become a primary funding stream for Russia's war against Ukraine. Striking Russia's oil facilities is Ukraine's way of declaring that its resistance isn't going anywhere.
This long-range, cross-border strike in early September was the deepest hit since Russia's full-scale invasion began. The Kyiv Independent called it a "new record set." Ukraine's Special Operations Forces (SSO) reached a target 3,200 kilometers away, deep into Siberia, using a new type of drone: the FP-1. The site is just 600 kilometers from another major Russian LNG facility, which makes this, unmistakably, a serious warning shot at Moscow.
To cut off Russia's economic lifelines, Ukraine has been methodically targeting oil facilities, and its reach keeps growing. On July 6, Ukraine hit a refinery in Omsk, about 2,500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. On September 7, it hit one in Perm, over 1,500 kilometers away. This latest strike, on Yamalo-Nenets in Siberia, was over 3,000 kilometers inside Russian territory.
Ukraine's drone industry is now second to none. How did it go, in just four years, from zero in 2022 to a target of more than 7 million units by 2026? The unfortunate answer: Ukraine has become a vast laboratory of war. Under relentless attack, it had no choice but to build a real-time digital system linking the military, manufacturers, and government, cutting through peacetime bureaucracy to out-produce and out-innovate the enemy. A drone that fails on the front line gets improved and redeployed almost immediately, "order in the morning, new version by evening." It's a fast, flexible ecosystem that lets Ukraine keep ordering, designing, procuring, and delivering even in the midst of an invasion. A battlefield and a supply chain unlike anything in traditional warfare. This is also an industry racing against the clock: fall behind, and people die. Four years in, Ukraine hasn't just worn Russia down, it's built a drone supply chain formidable enough that Europe and the U.S. are lining up to partner with it. So is Taiwan.
I was in Kyiv on May 24 when Russia attacked it with drones. Ukrainian forces hit back hard, intercepting more than 90 percent of the drones over Kyiv that day. Without Ukraine's drone defenses, a lot of people in Kyiv might not have made it, myself included. When I walked outside the next morning, lucky to be alive, what I saw was broken walls, buildings blown open. Anyone who has lived through that would look at the drone bill the KMT pushed through Taiwan's Legislative Yuan at the end of August and see it for what it is: gambling with Taiwanese lives.
Drones must be a weapon first. The money comes second. Ukraine's drone defense industry is led by its Ministry of Defense, which tightly controls production and sales across hundreds of manufacturers nationwide. A drone's commercial value depends on it being an extremely effective weapon that proves itself in combat, only then does an industry become possible. The KMT-drafted bill instead hands development of the drone industry to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, with the Ministry of National Defense stepping in only for military procurement. Its stated rationale is rooting out alleged DPP cronyism, as if neutral allocation of government resources alone were enough to make the industry healthy and sell Taiwanese drones worldwide. Everything about it is backwards.
If the Ministry of National Defense, which understands warfare far better than the legislature does, can't control the budget or specify what new drones need to do, it can't make effective calls for the industry, and the industry can't move forward. Rooting out corruption matters. So does dismantling bureaucratic thinking, and not letting partisan warfare kill the country's chances. Taiwan has lived under the CCP's threat for years, with Beijing telling the world Taiwan is Chinese territory. If four-plus years of Ukraine's fierce resistance still hasn't changed how people here think, and we keep putting this off, the consequences will be serious. This May, I traveled to Lviv and Kyiv and had the privilege of meeting with people leading Ukraine's drone industry. "It's hard," they said. The moment the conversation turned to the war, their faces instantly turned serious and cold. These are young, passionate patriots. They didn't go into drone manufacturing to get rich. They wanted to end the nightmare of war. “Nobody needs to keep dying. We wish it didn't have to be this way."
