The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The U.S. and Ukraine Make a Drone Deal || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

The U.S. has finally secured its first contract to manufacture Ukrainian-designed drones, but don't go celebrating quite yet. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4glafgg

Hey, all, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 1st of July, and the news is good news. We have our first contract granted by the Department of Defense to have a U.S. manufacturer produce Ukrainian drones under license. There's not a lot of information out at this point. It's all super secret, but I'll share what I know and give you a couple of guesses based on what we know what that means. So step one. The American company involved is called Ukrainian Defense. drones. Catchy name. And the Ukrainian company on the other side is called F drones. F drones is one of the big boys in Ukraine for producing ever more innovative policies and doctrines and designs and getting them to the front. Their F7 drone from last year, yeah, 2025, yeah, was basically voted the drone of the year for how good it was against emplacements and vehicles. The new drone that the

United States is going to be producing is called the F-10. We know it's 100% non-Chinese parts. And aside from that, we just know that the 10 means it's 10 inches across, which means it's a quadcopter. And it is a first-person drone. So you're going to have a dude with a controller relatively close to the front line. That suggests from its size that it has some range limitations,

probably only 25 to 40 kilometers. And it probably can only carry a warhead that's three or four kilos. That's probably not enough to take out a tank, but more than enough to wreck the day of, say, an artillery crew and go after personnel or trucks. That's the good news. The bad news is there's no sign at the moment that the F10 is one of the drones that has the terminal guidance that the Ukrainians have been starting to introduce across the front

and across their entire drone fleet this past year. Those are the things that load a decision tree into the drone so that when it gets over its target area, it can actually look around and pick a target for itself. And once it does that, it can't be jammed. Now, this is just a contract. It's part of the American program to try to get 200,000 drones in active service before the end of 2027, just next year. But this is going to be a late bloomer in that because the facility that has been tagged to build these drones in Ohio hasn't begun construction yet. We only got go ahead for the construction last week, and they're not expecting to finish construction until December of 29.

So three and a half years from now, and then they'll start building out the first packet of drones, and they've only ordered 2,000 of them. And at a rate of, say, $650 to $700, you know, these just aren't particularly sophisticated drones, which is fine. The key thing is that for the first time we have a direct contract from DOD for Ukrainian equipment, which is something we've been desperately to get in this country, I would argue, even though all of our Western allies and Middle Eastern allies are way ahead of us on this front because they know they can't rely on American hardware.

There's a lot of things can still go wrong. For example, the reason we don't have a contract until now is that Donald Trump personally despises President Zelensky of Ukraine. And it's entirely possible at this moment that Trump is unaware that this contract even exists. And as soon as he finds out he may well squash it. But hopefully it is the first of several thousand contracts. tracks to come that it would allow the United States to take advantage of the war zone in Ukraine to help test an entirely new set of weapon systems and take advantage of the Ukrainian skill sets, which were by far the most advanced in the world when it comes to the designing and the use

and the development of doctrine for these new types of hardware. Early days, once this facility is constructed, it's supposed to be producing a wide variety of defense equipment, of which Ukrainian drones are just one tiny little piece. So it's a step in the right direction regardless, and I just hope that's a small step all down a very long path of tighter partnership. That's probably just wishful thinking from me, but at least we have the first step.