By Yaroslav Trofimov and Bojan Pancevski | Photography by Lucia Blahova for WSJ

MUNICH -- When the full-scale Russian invasion began, Western defense manufacturers rushed their modern weaponry into Ukraine, helping Kyiv drive back a much more powerful foe.

Four years on, the flow of battle-tested technology is going the other way.

In a nondescript warehouse near Munich, a newly opened factory now churns out drones with proprietary Ukrainian engineering. Known as Linza, the drones come with Ukrainian anti-jamming modules, use artificial intelligence to navigate and can be deployed to gather reconnaissance, deliver supplies or lay land mines. For now, the joint German-Ukrainian production line will feed the Ukrainian battlefield, but the plan, once fully operational, is to supply the wider European defense market.

European nations are snapping up Ukrainian front-line know-how, helping NATO militaries rewire themselves for a transformed battlefield that is dominated by drones and electronic warfare, and where even new weapons can become obsolete in a few months.

For countries like Germany, the "Build With Ukraine" initiative allows them to couple state subsidies with Ukrainian innovation, revitalizing sluggish economies and retooling ailing factories. For Ukraine, it means more weapons to its troops -- paid for by its allies.

The factory near Munich, which was opened by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius in February, is one of at least 10 that Ukrainian and European defense companies plan to get online by the end of the year.

Some 80% of its workers are Ukrainian -- refugees who came to Germany after the full-scale invasion of their country, as well as long-term residents.

Anna, who arrived in Germany as an au pair from Ukraine 15 years ago, now works in human resources at the joint venture. "So many people who came here want to feel themselves useful, to retain a connection to Ukraine," she said. "They want to know: This drone that I am assembling right here, it will save someone's life back home."

On the same day as opening the factory, Zelensky also announced another partnership in Germany between the drone-software company Auterion, based in Germany and the U.S., and the Ukrainian drone maker Airlogix, a project that is slated to receive hundreds of millions of euros in German subsidies.

In Denmark, Fire Point, a maker of Ukrainian missiles and drones, is establishing a facility in the southern Jutland region to produce rocket fuel, according to the Danish government.

The Build With Ukraine model "is important to us, because it means additional weapons for our front line, paid for by our partners," said Oleksandr Kamyshin, Zelensky's adviser for strategic affairs who oversees military industries. It also allows European leaders to build modern systems to better defend their countries, he said.

Jolted by Russian drone incursions and suspected sabotage attacks, as well as uncertainty about U.S. commitments to their security, European nations have pledged hundreds of billions of euros in additional spending to shore up their defenses. With most American aid to Ukraine halted since President Trump assumed office in 2025, Europeans are now footing most of the bill. The European Union is committing to a EUR90 billion aid package, equivalent to about $106 billion, with additional funding from the U.K. and Norway.

"We must learn quickly from Ukraine: They are the world's largest testing range for new weapons systems, and they are innovating incredibly fast," said Germany's Economy Minister Katherina Reiche, who has been spearheading the new model of funding for Ukraine.

She has traveled to Kyiv aiming to set up partnerships between enfeebled German automobile and machine makers -- industries that currently shed 15,000 specialist jobs a month -- and Ukrainian arms companies. Germany will provide funding and its vast industrial capacity for these projects, while the Ukrainians will bring in war-proven tech, Reiche said.

"We need to use this capacity to help Ukraine but also make ourselves stronger," Reiche said. "Economic policy and security policy can no longer be separated."

The German government has set aside over EUR11 billion for funding Ukraine's defense this year. Up to EUR2 billion will go to subsidizing defense manufacturing in Ukraine but also in Germany, officials in Berlin say.

Germany's Auterion and Ukraine's Airlogix will supply AI-driven midrange drones to Kyiv, Berlin and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization capitals starting in April.

In the recently opened factory near Munich, the venture between Quantum Systems, a German drone maker, and Frontline Robotics, a Ukrainian military technology company, is the first Build With Ukraine project to go into production. The plan is to make 10,000 Linza drones every year in the first instance.

When the full-scale war began in 2022, Quantum Systems supplied the Ukrainian military with its own winged observation drone, called Vector. It enabled one of the most spectacular tactical setbacks for Russia -- the destruction of a large Russian armored force as it attempted to cross the Siverskyi Donets river in the Luhansk region in May 2022.

But within a few months, the rapid development of Russia's electronic-warfare capability rendered the Vector drones obsolete.

"We had to iterate, we had to adapt, and in this constant process we realized early on that you can do this only with presence in Ukraine," said Matthias Lehna, the managing director of the joint venture. Other companies were sending their products to Ukraine and leaving them to it, he said. "That's not possible in Ukraine because, there, you need to adapt way quicker."

A small support workshop that Quantum established in Ukraine has since grown into a full production facility with 450 employees -- and led the German company to invest last year in Frontline Robotics, a startup established in 2023 by four Kyiv-area engineers. Once scaled up, the facility near Munich will also supply European militaries outside Ukraine.

"The idea is to close the gap that all Western armed forces have right now because they see that they are behind in the drone technology," said Lehna, who is a former German military officer.

Production in Germany will cost only moderately more than in Ukraine, officials say, and removes the fear of Russian bombing. The Linza drones will remain in the same price range as some of the commercially available Mavic drones produced by Chinese company DJI -- but include built-in anti-jamming capacity and other features required by the military.

In Ukraine, which had a major defense industry before the Russian invasion, defense manufacturers have developed sophisticated new capabilities over the past four years, especially in long-range aerial drones, naval drones and missiles. Its defense industries, however, are regularly targeted and suffer from the nationwide power outages caused by Russian bombing.

Mykyta Rozhkov, a director at Frontline Robotics and the top Ukrainian executive at the joint venture with Quantum, recalled how his company's production facility was targeted by a salvo of 14 Russian Shahed drones. There were no casualties, but machinery was damaged. Many Ukrainian defense manufacturers have to be ready to move production on short notice, and as a result don't invest in bulky, expensive equipment.

"The challenge we've really had is how to scale this sophisticated product in Ukraine under the wartime risks," Rozhkov said. "Here [in Germany], of course, there is a different set of risks. We don't expect Iskander missiles, hopefully, but we still have to be concerned about infiltration, and we are taking our countermeasures."

Most employees at the factory, the exact location of which is secret, don't disclose their full names or allow their faces to be photographed because of concerns that they may be tracked down by Russian intelligence.

The appearance of Ukrainian defense plants on German soil has already sparked the ire of Russian TV propagandists, with one imitating Adolf Hitler to condemn Germans for making the tools that take innocent Russian lives.

Dmytro, a drone-testing engineer at the facility, was injured three times on the Ukrainian front line before moving to Germany in 2024 with his wife and child. "Our motivation is clear: to help Ukraine," he said. "I used to do this bearing arms, and now I do it here at the factory."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com and Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

Mykyta Rozhkov is chief business development officer at Frontline Robotics. "Ukraine Depended on Western Weaponry. Now That Script Has Flipped.," at 10 p.m. ET on March 1, incorrectly said he was a director at the company.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 02, 2026 12:26 ET (17:26 GMT)

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